Marathon

Bungie

The dust has settled on Marathon’s season 2 launch and free week, which ended up being about 10 days due to initial server problems. It was a dual test to see if players would stay or return for a second season, and how many new players would show up to try the game, hopefully making a $40 purchase if they liked it.

A few days later, it’s clear that there have been no significant turnarounds in the game’s trajectory.

The public-facing numbers for Steam, which is roughly two-thirds of Marathon’s population, saw the game hit a concurrent peak of 40,000 when season 2 hit, less than half of its paid launch. But it lost players each subsequent day, including over the weekend, and by the time the free week ended, it was down to around 18,000 players a night. This past weekend declined from that and now the game peaked at 12,753 players last night.

For context, the issue here is that number is nearly identical to what the game was doing at the very tail end of the season before season 2 launched, around 11-12K. So it has returned to that low baseline in two weeks, which previously took the game two months to hit after season 1’s launch.

Outside of playercounts, we also have public-facing data that Marathon is outside the top 100 in top sellers on Steam, currently at #116, joining the fact that it’s #157 in daily users. So the free week does not appear to have been some mass driver of sales.

Marathon has really pulled out of all the stops to try to get a broader selection of players engaged. It is much easier to progress more quickly and unlock meaningful hero upgrades earlier on in the season now. Balancing was such that newer players were not supposed to go up against veterans right away. And the game launched with what was more or less a PvE mode on Night Marsh, leaning into the sponsored kit mode that makes the game more accessible but goes against the whole “go in with your good loot you can lose” idea of an extraction shooter. A full PvE mode experiment has yet to happen, but there will be fewer players around to try it when it arrives later in the season.

Destiny fans have very much noted that their “dead game,” which will no longer get new updates, has averaged over 100,000 concurrent Steam players a night after a new update, with a console base twice that big. It has also ranked as high as #3 on Steam’s revenue chart (it’s still there right now, a week later). Granted, there is a big difference between the last update ever of an 11-year-old game, one that costs way more to maintain, and Marathon, but it’s just a fact that Marathon is now the only game that will support Bungie from here, unless some sort of incubation project gets greenlit. As such, there are founded fears that large-scale layoffs are imminent.

Sony has publicly backed Marathon in a recent earnings call (one where they did not mention Destiny at all), and its game director has rolled out a plan for five seasons of content. But it is not clear if there can be “a thing” to turn Marathon around here, as we’re running out of things to try between PvE or even potentially making the game free-to-play, given what we just saw. The road ahead is steep. Almost vertical, at this point.

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