The full 24-hour launch period of Marathon is now over, and the numbers are in. The hour of its release saw a concurrent Steam player count of 81,152, which rose to 88,337 players last night, the peak player count of its last 24 hours. We’re now a whole day later and the game sits at 55,000 concurrent Steam players. Whilst hardly a disaster and it is a best-seller, these numbers aren’t particularly great for Marathon either, and we’re going to explain why the Steam player count matters in this instance.
As a live service game, Marathon will rely heavily on an engaged and active player base. 88,000 is a great active player base for one platform in a day, but Marathon doesn’t exist within a vacuum. Live service games have predictable and observable trends, with highs that slowly drop until new content, updates or marketing brings back former players and adds new ones. If 88,000 players is the high, that’s going to be rough for Bungie if it starts to drop.
Marathon is a big deal: it had over 300 developers, it’s Bungie’s first (somewhat) original game in over a decade, and their first since being acquired by Sony. The PlayStation-owners had huge plans for the live service genre, but pulled back somewhat following the disaster of Concord – but Marathon survived.
There are a lot of eyes on the game, and it just isn’t performing like its competitors did at the same time on PC. Sony’s last big shooter success was Helldivers 2 which had a launch day of 64,000 peak players on Steam but rose to 91,000 players the next day, which is a rising trend that Marathon hasn’t yet shown signs of. The closest existing game to Marathon is ARC Raiders, and that launched with 264,000 players on its first day. Finally just for fun, Bungie’s own Destiny 2 launched with 214,000 players on Steam and Marathon‘s own beta had a peak of 143,000 players.
There’s of course always the possibility that Marathon is a huge seller on another platform or its first weekend will explode exponentially, but we’re not seeing the signs of that yet. Compared to the other games in Marathon‘s same league, it’s falling short. When your entire business model is built on long-term engagement from players, you’ll need the player base turning out for key events like your launch. Steam has proven to be a somewhat accurate reflection of the popularity of many games, especially of the online variety, and right now it looks like Marathon needs a boost.
