During Marathon’s Open Play, which is still ongoing from now until June 9th, a PlayStation Store pricing quirk briefly made the Marathon Deluxe Edition available for $14 instead of its normal $49.99 price tag. The method, first surfaced by Wario64, involved adding the free Marathon trial to your PSN account and then navigating to the Deluxe Edition purchase page, which would register the trial as if you owned the Standard Edition, allowing you to upgrade to Deluxe Edition at a discounted rate.
The deal spread online quickly as creators such as Wario64 and Cheap Ass Gamer both posted about it, causing the sale to spread widely across the gaming deal community before Bungie and Sony patched it out. The $14 price doesn’t appear to be available anymore, but the situation it exposed is worth talking about due to the patch coming with a disclosure that wasn’t visible to some users when they purchased the pack.
What The Fixed Revealed
After the pricing error was corrected, the PlayStation Store page for Marathon’s Deluxe Edition was updated to include the following notice:
Please note that if you have already downloaded Marathon during the Open Play Week but have not purchased Marathon:
• Purchasing this product will grant access to the Deluxe Edition content only for the duration of the Open Play Week, after which accessing this content will require purchase of the Marathon Standard Edition.
• The price displayed reflects only the Deluxe Edition content add-ons, not the Standard Edition price.
Reading that carefully, it’s essentially stating that if you bought the Deluxe Edition upgrade during the Open Play Week without already owning the Standard Edition, you may only have access to the Deluxe content until June 9th, when Open Play Week ends. After that, you’d need to purchase the Standard Edition to even play the game, despite already having that upgrade.
The critical issue with this statement, however, is that the disclosure wasn’t visible on the PSN store page before purchase. The small print about Standard Edition ownership being required or even that this “upgrade” doesn’t include the base game is buried in the PC version of the Storefront. On PlayStation consoles, players purchasing the Deluxe Edition during Open Play Week have no clear indication that what they are purchasing is effectively a DLC pack for a game they don’t actually own. It shows up as if the $14 upgrade included the Marathon base game in the package.
Why This is Important
Marathon launched on March 5th, 2026, at a price tag of $39.99 for the Standard Edition and $49.99 for the Deluxe Edition. The game has been a commercially difficult product, with Bungie being quite the expensive acquisition for Sony and Marathon not breaking even yet, so a price error is probably not what Sony wants right now, unless that FOMO aspect helped sell copies like hotcakes. The execution of an Open Play Week is a good idea regardless, as it allows players a free trial period to finally figure out what Marathon is about and if this is a game they want to stick with.
Regardless of that Trial, the real issue here isn’t the price error itself, but instead how it was communicated to players. There was no clear indication on the PSN storefront that what they were buying wasn’t a full copy of the game. The only indication at the time was “Marathon Standard Edition owners will see an upgrade price when purchasing the Marathon Deluxe Edition,” which could only be seen on the PC storefront. On PlayStation, it wasn’t visible until after the situation blew up and Sony added the warning retroactively. By that point, some players had already spent money under the reasonable assumption that purchasing a Deluxe Edition of a game meant they owned that game.
Think about it with this scenario: Someone saw a $14 Deluxe Edition, bought it in good faith, played through Open Play Week, and then lost access on June 9. They didn’t do anything wrong. They paid money on a platform that didn’t tell them what they were actually buying. This begs the question of whether Sony should offer refunds for those who purchased the upgrade in good faith, or if they should throw people a bone who just wanted a good deal and give them the base copy post-trial end.
