Herman Hulster, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment Studios Business Group, said Marathon will not be the next Star Trek.In a recent "fireside conversation" with investors, Hulster admitted that "Start" was less than Sony's expectations, but added that the publisher has learned some valuable lessons from this hero shooter after it went disastrously in August 2024 and subsequently cancelled.

After praising the success of "Jedi 2", Hulster admitted that Sony has also faced many challenges in recent months, and took "Star Story" as an example to assure investors that Sony has taken measures to ensure that the first-person evacuation shooter "Marathon" will not repeat the same mistakes, which will be developed by Bungie.He also praised the now-disbanded Firewalk Studios for the efforts of the Stars, pointing out that fierce competition and marketing issues in the real-time service game genre were the main reasons for the game’s failure – which ultimately led to the refund incident and the closure of the Stars development studio.

“In fact, I think the game has put in a lot of great work and great effort,” Hulster said of Stars, “but in the end, it entered a very competitive market segment. I think it lacked enough differentiation to resonate with the players. So we’ve looked at our process based on that to understand in depth why the game failed to meet expectations to make sure we don’t make the same mistake again.”

Hulster explained that Sony has implemented new operating procedures to ensure publishers will not repeat the same mistakes when the Marathon goes live later this year.

“We have introduced stricter processes to validate and revalidate our creative, commercial and development assumptions, and now we will perform these processes more continuously,” Hulster said. “This plan will ensure we invest in the right opportunities at the right time while maintaining a more predictable timeline.

“For Marathon, our goal is to launch a game that is extremely bold, innovative and deeply engaging. It will be Bungie’s first new game in over a decade, so we’re very excited about its release. We are monitoring the test cycle and are going through the closed alpha test that the team just completed. We are learning all the lessons learned and leveraging our established capabilities – including analytics and user testing – to understand how players interact with the game.”

Hulster acknowledged that although some users’ feedback was “uneven”, it was also “very useful” for the development of the Marathon.

“That’s why the tests are done,” Hulster explained to investors. “The ongoing testing and ongoing validation of hypotheses that we just talked about is crucial to iterating and continually improving the game. So when the game goes live, we will give it the best chance to succeed.”

A former Firewalk Studios developer also seems to agree that Marathon deserves a chance.

“I have been involved in the development of Stars and did my best,” the developer shared. “We failed to meet expectations, please don’t punish others for our mistakes.”

Regarding Marathon, the anonymous developer said they “really don’t want to be ‘that’ developers, as compelling as if they had a stake in this competition,” adding: “But I think it’s crazy to call it a failure before Marathon was released.”

"Marathon" is scheduled to be launched on September 23 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC and Xbox Series X platforms.