Bungie ran into an awkward moderation problem during early access for Marathon. Twitch streamer Lirik discovered the game was censoring “Arc Raiders” in text chat during a recent broadcast.
When Lirik tried typing the phrase, Marathon‘s chat system blocked it from appearing. He and viewers tested variations to confirm what was happening. Typing “Arc” alone worked fine. The full phrase “Arc Raiders” got filtered.
To make sure it wasn’t a platform-wide issue, Lirik jumped into Escape from Tarkov and typed the same phrase. It went through without any problems. The censorship was specific to Marathon.
The clip spread quickly and Bungie’s Marathon team responded fast. The developers pushed a hotfix removing the block and acknowledged the issue publicly on social media. Players testing the chat after the patch confirmed they could type “Arc Raiders” normally.
Arc Raiders is an extraction shooter from Embark Studios that competes in the same space as Marathon. Both games target similar audiences in the crowded multiplayer shooter market. That made the censorship particularly noticeable since players frequently compare competing titles in chat.
The filter behavior wasn’t consistent across all players. Some users on US servers reported they could type the phrase without issues. Others suggested non-English language clients might not have been affected at all. The inconsistency pointed to a configuration error rather than an intentional block.
Players noted similar incidents in recent Battlefield and Call of Duty releases. The phrase “Arc Raiders” apparently triggers issues with automated moderation tools used across multiple games. Whether that’s due to shared third-party filtering systems or overlapping word lists remains unclear.
