Chris Sides spent four years as Director of Product Management on Bungie’s in-development Marathon before leaving in July 2024. On a recent Shooter Monthly podcast appearance, he revealed that he lobbied hard against calling the game an extraction shooter.
“I pushed hard on our marketing team to create a different genre name,” Sides said on the new Shooter Monthly Podcast. He called the extraction shooter label “so dumb” and argued it’s the only genre named after a mechanic rather than an identity.
His main gripe is that the term creates confusion across the industry. He pointed to Helldivers 2 as an example of a game that gets mislabeled as an extraction shooter when it’s really a co-op PvE game. He also argued that Arc Raiders has more in common with Rust than Escape From Tarkov, questioning whether the extraction shooter label even makes sense for games with survival elements.
The extraction shooter genre typically refers to session-based PvP or PvPvE games where players enter a map, collect loot, and must reach an extraction point to keep their gear. The catch is permanent loss on death. Escape From Tarkov defined the formula, with games like Hunt: Showdown and The Division‘s Dark Zone establishing the high-stakes loop.
Marathon represents Bungie’s revival of its 1990s sci-fi FPS series, now reimagined as a competitive multiplayer game. When Bungie revealed the project in May 2023, the studio explicitly marketed it as a PvP extraction shooter. The game has faced reported delays and internal challenges but no public release date has been announced.
Product Management roles focus on market positioning and audience strategy rather than creative design. Sides’ comments reflect frustration with how the industry categorizes games that share extraction mechanics but differ in core progression systems, risk models, and gameplay loops.
Despite Sides pushing for a different term during his tenure, Bungie’s official materials still describe Marathon as an extraction shooter. The label aligns player expectations with games like Tarkov rather than traditional campaign shooters or pure battle royale titles.
