Marathon, the new first-person extraction shooter from Bungie is days away from launching at the time of this writing. It'll be out on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on March 5, 2026, but you can play it right now if you want to on its Server Slam Test.
So far, the test seems to be going well, at least by its player numbers. On Steam, the test has so far peaked at 143,621 concurrent players, and while we'll see how players feel about the game when the test is done, one thing that's already been called out is that, at least when it first launched, the in-game chat in the Server Slam Test was censoring the phrase 'ARC Raiders.'
Per a report from Kotaku, the bug or whatever was causing this to happen has since been patched out. The official X (formerly Twitter) account for the Marathon development team shared that it had been fixed and added "ARC Raiders is awesome" for good measure.
We've also tested it in the server slam test and can confirm that ARC Raiders is no longer censored in the chat.
We reached out to Bungie to see if we could learn why this happened, but we have yet to hear back. Whether it was a one-in-a-million kind of bug, or Bungie purposely taking a silly shot at the game that people have been connecting Marathon to, since they are both extraction shooters, and ARC Raiders is currently one of the best-selling, most popular games in the world, it's pretty weird.
It's also a little bit funny, but still mostly weird. Regardless, it'll be interesting to see how the rest of this server slam test goes, not just with regard to how people come away from it feeling about the game, but also with how effective Bungie's work to stop cheaters in Marathon are.
The studio has made it clear that it will not suffer cheaters. If you're caught, you are permanently banned. You can try to appeal the decision, but any one-time offence will get you banned from Marathon forever, "no second chances."
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
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