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Marathon hasbeen out for just over a month now, and it's been great. It's basically exactly what I wanted it to be: a PvP-focused extraction shooter with Bungie's signature gunplay and knack for visual flair. I've been having an absolute blast with it since launch, and it's a nice counterbalance to Arc Raiders' more social-sim approach. But there's been all this talk about player counts, and how Marathon isn't taking off in the same way as Arc Raiders has.
Rory Norris
This week: Filled up my vault with lots of high-end loot, only to lose it in Cryo Archive on the weekend.
And it makes sense: it's true. Marathon isn't the next big thing. Marathon's 88,000 concurrent player peak on Steam at launch was pretty respectable, but the daily rates have decreased to a little over 20,000 concurrents by now. Compare that to Arc Raiders, which is still reaching well over 100,000 concurrents on Steam even on a bad day months after launch.
However, without knowing what Bungie and Sony consider a success (and in what timeframe) after the years of development time and money invested into Marathon, it's basically impossible to confirm whether its performance is 'enough' for either team so far. Though I'd wager that the current baseline probably is below expectations for a new Bungie FPS after Sony spent $3.6 billion acquiring the studio and reports that Marathon cost over $200 million. That's quite an uphill battle.