Marathon has dropped to a 15,000 daily concurrent users peak on Steam, while also exiting the top 50 and top 100 PlayStation and Xbox best-sellers lists, respectively.
Bungie’s extraction shooter Marathon is hitting a rough patch only weeks into its live-service journey, with Steam concurrent player count stats and PlayStation and Xbox storefront rankings painting a concerning picture for the studio’s latest release. According to the data available on SteamDB, the game peaked at just 15,243 concurrent players over the last 24 hours. These numbers are rather concerning, given that the game was seen as Bungie’s next major live-service venture after Destiny 2. Instead, Marathon’s player activity on certain days that trails even the latter’s own modest Steam player stats.
On Xbox, Marathon has fallen well outside the top 100 best-sellers in virtually every region. In the US, where the title is performing relatively better, it currently sits at #144 on Xbox’s popular games chart. In many other territories, the game has slipped into the 200s or even 300s, hardly the sort of momentum expected from a premium multiplayer game launch from Bungie. Meanwhile, on PlayStation, tracker sites and storefront rankings show a similar situation. Although exact rankings vary depending on the data source, Marathon is currently outside the top 50 on most trackers, with the US PlayStation Store listing it at #54 on the best-sellers chart.
The most worrying trend isn’t the underwhelming launch numbers but the speed of Marathon’s drop-off. The game appears to have lost well over 80% of its launch audience before even reaching the latter stretch of Season 1, indicating a player retention problem.
Marathon got a positive overall critical reception, with many praising its gunplay, movement, and mechanical polish. Bungie is considered among the best in the business when it comes to first-person shooter “feel,” but strong mechanics alone clearly weren’t enough to sustain interest in an increasingly crowded multiplayer landscape. Extraction shooters already cater to a somewhat niche audience, and players are more selective than ever about where they invest time. If progression, content cadence, rewards, or long-term goals wear thin, even a polished shooter can quickly become stale.
The question now is whether Season 2 can turn things around for Marathon. While Bungie does have the experience to pull it off, player sentiment can harden quickly once momentum is lost.
