Checking In On ‘Marathon’ A Month After Launch

Marathon

Bungie

We just ticked past a month since Marathon launched, Bungie’s high-profile extraction shooter attempting to chase hits in the genre and avoid its brutal pitfalls. A lot has happened during that time, and I thought it would be a good moment to reflect and see where we’ve landed after that initial launch window. Here are the highlights:

• Marathon has excelled with its user scores, currently at 88% positive reviews on Steam, 4.54/4 stars on PlayStation and a 4.1/5 on Xbox. The point being that most players who have actually purchased the game like it.
• More reviews have come in from critics for Marathon in time, where it has been pushed from the high 70s to now an 82 Metacritic score on PS5, which includes notable scores from bigger outlets like Game Informer (9.3), GameSpot (9), PC Gamer (9) and IGN (9).
• About two weeks ago, analyst firm Alinea estimated that Marathon had sold around 1.2 million copies across all platforms. I confirmed with my Bungie sources that was close to accurate. Marathon had previously hit #2 on the Steam revenue chart ahead of launch.
• Also near-accurate is a 478K daily active user count in its first weekend, though that dropped to 345K more recently. That data is two weeks old, however.

• As I previously reported, the majority of Marathon’s playerbase is on Steam, as confirmed by my sources. Alinea reports it as 70%
• That report said that average playtime was 28 hours on Steam, with 22% of players at more than 50 hours and 7% past 100, indicating a hardcore fanbase immediately latching onto the game. Those numbers will have gone up since then.
• Marathon did not chart inside Steam’s top 10 at launch. It released with an 88,337 concurrent peak on its largest platform. That is a drop from the 143,621 peak during the free server slam (the game is now $40).
• Since launch just over a month ago, those peaks have dropped by 68%, where the game most recently hit a 27,670 peak at the time of this writing.
• Marathon’s ultra-endgame activity, Cryo Archive, launched on Friday, March 20. The tick-up in players was only slightly above that of a normal weekend increase.
• Marathon is now the 106th most-played game on Xbox. I do not have full PS5 data, though it did chart on its top 10 list at launch. Marathon is 78th in daily active users on Steam at the time of this writing, 82nd in top sellers.
• I can confirm Marathon’s budget is over $200 million. Likely more than $250 million. That does not include ongoing costs for maintenance and new content now.

So, those are the numbers, good ones, less good ones. Analysis? Here’s a bit.

Why do active players like Marathon? – It is a wholly unique game in both the extraction space and the shooter space in general. Bungie gunplay is altered, but present. The “hero” kits did not turn out poorly, as some thought they would. The later two maps, Outpost and Cryo Archive, blend puzzles and an actual raid boss in a way that has never been seen in the genre. Players with active teams are especially having a great time. Many enjoy solo play or Rook skulking as well.

Why are players falling off? – Those are notable declines, notably quick. There isn’t really a way to spin that. There may be many reasons, but one is rather simple: the game is too hard for many players. That’s not condescension; Marathon prides itself on being a very hardcore game in what is already a very hardcore genre. With the release of Outpost, Cryo Archive and Ranked, the game is more competitive than it’s ever been as it slims down to better players with better gear. It can wear on you, even if you like it.

What issues has it faced? – There have been a few notable problems. RNG spawns were tied to Cryo Archive completions, which were patched. The Compiler ultra-boss drops a weapon that is overpowered. It has been nerfed once, but will likely be again. Generally speaking, Bungie has moved very quickly on these patches at roughly 10x the speed they have for Destiny lately. There are also rising issues with cheaters, particularly at higher ranks where there’s more at stake, plus the genre problem of losing not just a map, but an entire loadout when cheaters hit.

How is the game doing, overall? – We have absolutely made it out of the “Concord” conversation, which has claimed Highguard and even a few other games since then. It has not posed a significant challenge to ARC Raiders, though that game is dealing with its own declines.

There is an argument, however, that these current figures, even though declines are expected/good enough for a hardcore PvP game, as of course that wasn’t going to be made for a wide audience. But again, this is hundreds of employees working for half a decade with hundreds of millions of dollars invested, and it’s a must-win in Sony’s floundering live-service push. You have to take context into account here, and there are higher expectations and more pressure on Marathon than most. It needs more players. It needs to stop losing players. It needs to make money going forward from its microtransactions.

We will not know anything official about Sony’s reception of the game and whether it says it is or isn’t hitting its marks until some sort of earnings call where it may or may not be mentioned, but much of the math is easy to do.

On Bungie’s end, there is less panic than when the game was flailing with multiple controversies last summer. They are mostly heads-down, working on new content, and whatever the case may be, this is not a game that is about to face some sort of imminent shutdown. And these days, that’s enough to qualify as a win.

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