Marathon players slam the battle pass as the "worst value for your money" and say Bungie never learns

Just days after the full launch of Marathon, players have turned their frustration toward Bungie's monetization system. The main complaints center on the battle pass and the restrictions around cosmetic items – specifically, weapon stickers and charms.

The game lets you decorate your weapons with stickers and charms, but each item you unlock can only be applied to a single weapon. To put the same charm on multiple guns, you need duplicates – which are obtained primarily through real money. The same restriction applies to Twitch drops and preorder bonuses.

One player wrote on Reddit:

"Not only does this make customising your weapons feel bad, Bungie also use it as a way to pad out the reward pass with duplicates of the same item, because technically you are getting multiple of it to use on multiple weapons. This really takes away from how rewarding the 'reward pass' feels to progress through."

The restrictions have drawn immediate comparisons to Bungie's infamous Destiny 2 launch-era shader system, where shaders were single-use items. You needed five to outfit a full armor set, and there was no way to recycle or reuse them. As another player put it:

"Wouldn't be Bungie if they didn't completely fail to learn from their mistakes for the 100th time."

Marathon's system isn't quite as punishing as Destiny 2 was at launch, but the fact that players immediately made the connection isn't a great look for the new live-service game.

The battle pass itself has drawn a separate wave of criticism, with players calling it the "worst value for your money" they've ever seen in the genre.

"One single character skin. Seriously? Only one? I've never seen a paid battle pass in any game giving you less than two."

Beyond the thin reward pool, the pass doesn't return any of the spent money as in-game currency – something that has become standard practice in most live-service games. That combination is souring people on the shooter fast, even those who were genuinely excited about it.

"I fell in love with this game during the server slam and even upgraded my preorder to the deluxe edition. What can I say: lesson learned."

Bungie has yet to respond to the criticism. Whether the pushback leads to any changes in the coming days remains to be seen.