Marathon players farmed 77 days of loot in one week and Bungie is having a full panic attack

Bungie's newly launched extraction shooter Marathon is already in damage control mode, and it has only been live for a week. According to Kotaku, players collectively hoarded a staggering 77 days worth of loot in just seven days - meaning the game's economy is so busted it might as well be printing money in a Diablo dungeon.

The community is not exactly being subtle about it either. Player sentiment floating around is summed up pretty neatly by one quote making the rounds: "I think this season is cooked." When your playerbase is already writing the obituary in week one, that is a rough spawn point to be standing on.

Bungie hits the emergency eject button

Bungie is now scrambling to recalibrate Marathon's in-game economy before the whole loot loop collapses into a pile of purple gear nobody asked for. As Kotaku reports, the studio is actively working on adjustments to try and bring supply back in line with... well, literally anything resembling balance.

The problem with extraction shooters is that the loot economy IS the game. If players can vacuum up end-game caliber gear faster than Bungie can sneeze out a patch, the entire risk-versus-reward fantasy that makes the genre tick just evaporates. There is no tension in "extract or die" if everyone is already swimming in BiS (best-in-slot) items by Tuesday.

Is this a fatal bug or a recoverable glitch?

To be fair to Bungie, catching an economy implosion in week one is technically better than catching it in week six - at least there is still a player count worth saving. The studio has some track record of course-correcting on Destiny 2's economy over the years, so this is not totally uncharted territory for them.

But Marathon is a new IP trying to carve out space in an already savage extraction shooter market, and first impressions in live service games are basically a permadeath mechanic for player retention. Botching the launch economy is the kind of thing that sends players straight back to Escape From Tarkov or Hunt: Showdown without a second thought.

Bungie has not announced a specific fix timeline as of this writing, but the pressure is clearly on. Whether they can hotfix their way out of this particular raid wipe remains to be seen - but right now, the loot pinata has been thoroughly beaten, and all the candy is already on the floor.