Bungie Breaks Silence On The Scam Allegations

Added: 2026-06-07

[00:00:00]Bungie has responded to the scam allegations put against them recently with this crazy like marathon deluxe edition fiasco and they've chosen to take the correct route I would say here because they are trying to avoid a potential lawsuit. If you didn't watch our previous video here, it was titled New Bungee scam might lead to big lawsuit where we covered this news article that detailed the entire situation. But simply put, the TLDDW is that when they made the game go freetoplay, they didn't create it as a new standalone option in the store. So what people are able to do is use the free-to-play entry point and add just $14 to get the full deluxe edition, which I believe is normally like 70 bucks on launch, right? And in doing so, they were able to basically, you know, get a crazy discount and cheese the system. And what Sony did was they actually changed the text in the description for Marathon's Deluxe Edition so that way they wouldn't have to potentially give out refunds and that people would have to then go on and buy the base game on top of everything when it did initially say in the text that buying this included the base game, which is why a lot of people were saying, "Hey, this is bad, Bungie. This is really bad. You're going to have to do the right thing here. You're going to have to take one for the team." You don't want to be making pissing people off when your population is already down in the dumps right now, right? You want to do everything you can to not have any more bad PR for Marathon. So now, just today, just less than an hour ago, they finally responded to the situation. So, it's time to give you a full breakdown of what they said and what happened.

[00:01:38]According to their side of the story, we've been made aware of an issue on the PlayStation store where players could purchase the deluxe edition of Marathon at a mitigated price. So that $14 price tag and that's if they added Marathon to their library during the open play week.

[00:01:55]Purchasing the deluxe edition this way does not include the base game. And we've updated the PlayStation store messaging to clarify. So you see they ch they actually admitted that they changed the wording inside that because it wasn't initially there which is why a lot of people were like hey $14. A lot of people actually thought that this was a fair deal and that this was a really good way for them to get into the game and get that deluxe edition. You know, Marathon's already been on a big discount for a while. I think it's like 33% off on a lot of platforms. So, it's only like 20 something bucks, uh, dropping down from its, you know, original $40 price tag. So, some people thought that they were just truly lowering the price a ton to actually get people in the game, but it would seem as though that was not the case. And a lot of people were confused and annoyed because Sony is a bit finicky when it comes to refunds. So, people were confused if Sony would actually issue the refunds uh or if they would make you buy the base game on top of that. It'd be kind of annoying and kind of lame.

[00:02:52]Imagine you purchased the deluxe edition of Marathon during the open week and then after the open week, you literally don't have access to play the game. You spent $14 on a piece of content that is inaccessible to you. You basically just got, you know, suns setting 2.0 know, but Marathon edition this time. 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. Ooh, there it is. So, if you were part of the group of people that got it for $14, you're going to get the full thing just as you were advertised, right? No false advertising here, right? No lawsuit here with this stuff. Like, it's very good of Bungie to avoid any sort of litigation in this situation. And this would be also just a really bad look. Even if it wasn't like that much money or that many people that bought it, which let's be real, it probably not even like a thousand people did this, right? So even if it's not that much money, it's just better for the optics to be the good guy in the situation, not be the greedy corporation and understand that, you know, you messed up. It's on you to own that and accept the loss of income or whatever that go associates with it and move on from that point. This is in addition to the deluxe edition content. More info on timing will come soon. Ooh, that's really weird. The timing is fascinating.

[00:04:08]So, there may be a time period where after the freeto play week is over where you can't play the game like they're like that's going to be a weird time.

[00:04:16]People are going to be mad. Let's just say that people are going to be like really really guys. It would be wise of them to get the this locked down as fast as possible. You should be able to immediately after the free trial period is over play the full game if you bought this for the $14 price tag. Going forward, please note that if you've downloaded Marathon during the open play week, but have not purchased Marathon, purchasing the deluxe edition upgrade will only grant you access to the deluxe edition content for the duration of the play week. So, this is actually ridiculous. Like, you guys got to create your own standalone purchase or something. This is just going to confuse and frustrate people in the future because there's going to be some people that randomly buy this thinking the same thing or maybe not reading the description that are going to be so confused when they spent $14 for a piece of content that they only have access to for 7 days before they're locked out of it. Not a good look. Not a good setup here. We got to fix this. After which accessing this content will require purchase of the Marathon base edition.

[00:05:19]The price of the deluxe edition upgrade on the PlayStation store reflects only the deluxe edition content add-ons, not the base edition price. So, there you have it. Right, that's the situation right now. Still some nuance here and we'll see what happens. We'll bring you an updated video when we get into those situations. So, make sure you're subscribed with notifications on. Let's see what people are saying here. The top comment here says, "Moving forward with your piece of game is going to die soon. It's not going to last long. It's not worth $14 either. This game sucks so bad that it's gay. Okay. What the heck did I just read right now? This guy is getting jumped in the replies. It looks like he's got 14 likes and 14 replies.

[00:05:58]So, we got uh this person right here.

[00:06:01]You know, this guy is chirping.

[00:06:02]Everyone's doing their thing playing Marathon. And then they look over at him, give him a thumbs up. Yeah, I think this meme is pretty representative, fairly representative of Marathon as well because this represents all five people currently playing the game right now. Not that I agree with this guy.

[00:06:14]This guy's crazy. But the replies are always insane when it comes to marathon posts online to the discourse around this game is insane and has been insane for as long as possible. Someone said, "Great news for the 50 people who did this. So, it is a minor loss and looks good PR-wise. Everyone else who paid full price should be granted some bonus silk." Hey, not bad. I agree with that.

[00:06:36]And we got great decision to honor it.

[00:06:38]Get new players in. those kids are going to buy more skins, especially since they paid $15 for the game. I mean, maybe, maybe not. It sounds like they're the extreme cheapkates. Hard to say, right?

[00:06:47]I do think that any person that wants to play Marathon should be able to play.

[00:06:51]Like, they should go make the game potentially full freeto play pretty soon here. The charts are looking absolutely abysmal. You know, we've been keeping an eye on what it goes on to. So, we had Tuesday was its first day right here, 40,000. The second day goes to 37,000.

[00:07:04]Then it went down to 33,000. And today it's barely hitting 30,000. We're on a weekend day, so it's it's a Friday. This should be way higher than 3,000.

[00:07:14]Everyone's off work. The full game's free to play. This is bad, man. If people want to pay $14 to play this game, let them play. People want to pay $0, let him play. You might have to start paying people to play this game pretty soon. This guy said, "Damn it. I got refunded through chat after I noticed the change in message, figuring this wasn't going to happen. my life. Dang. If you applied for the refund and you got it. Thank you. I actually really like this game." says, "Chud maxer, nice. Let's go. Love you so much, Bungo." A decent amount of mixed replies here in this one. I do think this was the right decision. It'll be interesting to see what the timeline looks like going forward. And like I said, you you should fully fix this so that way it doesn't happen again. People shouldn't be you shouldn't even get the option to buy the deluxe edition when you're participating in the freetoplay week. That doesn't make any sense. You should have probably all microtransactions turned off uh in your free-to-play session. like doesn't make sense that you would buy things in a game that you have extremely limited access to. But we'll see what we'll see what Bungie does. Let me know what you think about the situation down below. Do you think that this was the right decision? Do you think that Bungie is smart to avoid potential lawsuit? And is this the correct PR move for them right now given the position with Marathon?

[00:08:24]We'll see you in the next one.