Bungie’s newly released sci-fi extraction shooter, Marathon, is a brutal but fun game. However, one conversation that continues to dominate Marathon’s community has to do with how many players are playing it on Steam. So many keep talking about this number, worrying that it’s too low and means the end of Marathon, that it’s making others frustrated and has even led to a player from less-popular FPS The Finals showing up to offer some words of wisdom about it all.
When Marathon launched on March 5, it came out of the gate with a big playercount spike on PC, according to data from SteamDB. It peaked at nearly 90,000 concurrent players on Steam, which isn’t as much as Arc Raiders, but a damn fine showing for a tough-as-nails FPS. But over the last 24 hours, Marathon’s concurrent playercount has dropped by more than 50 percent, bottoming out at one point at less than 32,000. All of this has been carefully watched by Marathon players and outsiders and then documented via many posts on the game’s biggest subreddit, doomposting about the playercount and comparing it to other games.
By the time you read this blog, you might be unable to actually find a lot of these SteamDB chart posts on the Marathon subreddit. That’s because a lot of players are tired of them, and the mods of the subreddit are trying to delete them, even as these posts continue to flood in. As you’d expect, this has all led to people posting about how they don’t agree with the mods taking down these posts, accusations that people are trying to hide the truth, and joke posts making fun of it all. But regardless of whether the posts are gone or not, the vibes on the Marathon subreddit continue to be bad as the game’s publicly available playercount data on SteamDB keeps dropping.
Someone shows up to calm down Marathon doomers
On Friday, a player who enjoys The Finals, an FPS from the team behind Arc Raiders, showed up to try to offer some words of wisdom. The Finals launched with over 240,000 players back in December 2023. But by January 2024, those numbers had dropped to 50,000. And over the last two years, The Finals’ concurrent stat has hovered in the 10,000 to 20,000 range. Despite that, it still has a community and active support, and the people who like it really like it a lot.
“Y’all got to let the numbers talk go,” said user In_Dux. “The Finals has some of the best feeling guns on the FPS market and a unique game mode that offered some of the most exciting moments I had in gaming. But the game’s not perfect, and it never had mass appeal. Because it’s unique mode and destruction are the main draws, and historically it has been too much for most casuals and not competitive enough for the hardcore players. There’s always a post about needing more marketing, different game modes, another MoistCritikal video, but the playerbase never gets and keeps the bump of players the hardcore fans want it to have.”
“And that’s ok. That’s the price of building something unique. It will be divisive, it will be niche,” said the player. “As long as Bungie can keep the lights on, that’s all that matters. And unless you’re ready to single-handedly buy 1 million+ copies if things get dire, then don’t even really concern yourself with. Save your money on passes if you don’t like them and/or think the ship’s sinking, but besides that, it’s out of our hands largely.”
Reaction to this post has been pretty positive, with many applauding it and hoping that posters on the Marathon subreddit follow the user’s advice, chill with all the doomspiraling over playercount, and just enjoy the game if they like it. About two hours later, however, someone posted an image on the subreddit comparing Marathon‘s playercount numbers with those of Slay the Spire 2. Welp.