Bungie is granting full Marathon base game access to players who were misled into purchasing the Deluxe Edition upgrade for $14.99 on the PlayStation Store during the game’s Open Play Week free trial – effectively handing those players the complete game at a fraction of its normal price, as reported by Push Square. The original PS Store product page implied the $14.99 purchase would unlock the full game, when in reality it only covered cosmetic add-ons – a distinction the listing catastrophically failed to make clear. Bungie has since updated the store description and confirmed it will honour all purchases made before the correction went live.
The Marathon Development Team posted on X confirming the scope of the make-good: “For those of you that made this purchase before the messaging was posted on the store page, we’ll be granting you the base edition of Marathon at no additional cost. This is in addition to the Deluxe Edition content.” That means qualifying players are walking away with both the full game and the cosmetic bundle for $14.99 – a price that normally only covered the upgrades, not a single mission of actual gameplay.
Here’s the context: The confusion stems from a quirk in how the PlayStation Store handled trial accounts. Once players added the free Open Play Week version of Marathon to their PS5 library, the storefront treated them as if they already owned the base game – so the Deluxe Edition appeared at $14.99 as though it were a simple price-difference upgrade, per Engadget. Outside that trial quirk, the full Deluxe Edition bundle is listed at $59.99, with a separate conventional discount bringing it to $41.99 – the $14 figure was never intended to represent a real total price for anything beyond cosmetics. Open Play Week itself was tied to Marathon‘s Season 2 update, and Bungie quietly extended it from June 9 to June 11 on PS5 amid the fallout. This isn’t even the first storefront blunder around the game – earlier, some Xbox players who pre-ordered Marathon reported that the purchase installed Destiny 2 instead, adding to a pattern of platform-side confusion that has dogged the title since launch. As we covered when Destiny 2 fans were review-bombing Marathon on Steam, community trust in Bungie‘s handling of this game is already running on fumes.
Honestly, this is Bungie doing the right thing under pressure – but the fact that external backlash was required before the fix arrived tells you everything about where the studio’s priorities have been. The PS Store listing was a structural failure: the platform treated trial users as owners, surfaced a price that meant nothing outside that context, and provided no clear warning until the complaints rolled in. Bungie called it an “issue” – which, translated, means a confusing product page that implied customers were buying something they weren’t. To the studio’s credit, the remedy is genuinely generous by live-service standards: $14.99 for the full game plus the cosmetic bundle is an outcome most affected players will take without complaint. But Marathon is a game Sony has already taken a ¥89.6 billion (approximately $560 million) impairment on – a figure tied directly to the title’s struggles and Destiny 2‘s concurrent decline, as Bungie‘s transition away from its flagship franchise continues to cost the studio dearly, context we laid out in our coverage of Bungie’s shift from Destiny 2 to Marathon. Giving out a few hundred extra game licenses to patch a comms failure is a rounding error against that backdrop – and getting more players into Marathon at any price point is arguably in everyone’s interest right now.
What remains unclear is whether Sony has made any independent statement on the storefront failure – the PlayStation Store is their platform, and the miscategorisation of trial accounts as owners is fundamentally a Sony-side infrastructure problem as much as a Bungie messaging one. It’s also not confirmed whether the make-good applies equally across all regions or whether there’s a formal deadline for affected accounts to receive the base game grant. Sony‘s CFO has indicated Marathon is still expected to reach full release before March 31, 2027, so the pressure on Bungie to stabilise player numbers – and storefront trust – isn’t going anywhere soon. The next real signal to watch is whether Season 2 content and the extended Open Play Week actually move the needle on active player counts.
Did you get caught out by the misleading listing during Open Play Week – and has your base game access come through yet? And when a $560 million acquisition is struggling this badly, does a free-game gesture feel like a genuine fix or just noise? Sound off in the comments below, and keep your eyes on GameLuster for more Bungie and Marathon coverage.
