Marathon's struggles lead Sony to take $560 million loss on Bungie

Sony's $3.6 billion buyout of Bungie is not going well for the PlayStation maker. As reported in Sony's latest earnings, Bungie's owner recorded an 88.6 billion yen ($565 million) impairment loss against the developer behind Marathon and Destiny 2. That whopping figure is included in Sony's fourth quarter earnings, which ended on March 31, or about four weeks after Marathon launched.

For the full year, Sony marked a 120.1 billion yen ($768 million) impairment loss against Bungie.

"Earnings from Bungie's title portfolio did not reach our expectations, so we downwardly revised our business plan and impaired the full amount of the fixed assets related to Bungie except for goodwill," Sony CFO and corporate executive officer Lin Tao said in comments. According to Investopedia, an impairment refers to "an unexpected and permanent drop in a fixed or intangible asset's value to a market value that's less than what's recorded on a company's balance sheet. The amount is recorded as a loss on the income statement." In other words, Bungie's value is much less than what Sony paid for it.

Bungie's latest game Marathon launched on March 5 and has struggled to find the success that the developer's Destiny games did. On Steam, Marathon peaked at 77,358 concurrent players in its first month, and is now hovering between 4,000 and 17,000 concurrent players based on data from Steam Charts. Destiny 2 peaked at 316,651 players on Steam at its height, according to Steam Charts. Despite largely positive reviews from critics and players, Marathon hasn't found a large, mainstream audience.

Sony's Tao acknowledged the game's performance in official comments, intimating that Sony remains committed to Marathon's ongoing development.

"Player reception to Marathon is strong, with the game receiving a Metacritic score of 82 and more than 90% of the player reviews on Steam being positive. Engagement metrics such as retention also remain at a high level," Tao said. "Going forward, we aim to improve the performance of the game by working to retain highly engaged core users through the introduction of additional content, further improvements in the gameplay experience, and expansion of the user base."

In one recent concession for Marathon players, Bungie just made one of the game's best sponsored Cryo Archive kits a free weekly download.

Marathon is available on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.

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