Marathon has been out for just over six weeks now, and it’s already going on sale on at least one platform: Xbox. The console where Bungie’s extraction shooter has seemingly been selling the worst will try to win over potential players with a 20-percent discount, but hardcore fans are already debating if more drastic measures are needed.
While still $40 on PlayStation 5 and Steam, Marathon is currently on sale for just $32 on Xbox Series X/S (via Forbes). That’s where, according to estimates by Alinea Analytics, Bungie’s latest multiplayer game sold only around 130,000 copies in its first month, barely 10 percent of its total sales across all platforms. The number of user reviews reflect that disparity, with only around 1,000 ratings on Xbox compared to 11,000 on PSN and 35,000 on Steam.
Players have been waiting for Sony and Bungie to take some sort of step toward trying to juice Marathon‘s player counts. Steam chart data is an incomplete picture of a game’s overall health but it shows the concurrent player numbers continuing to trend downwards. And Circana’s Mat Piscatella recently reported that Warframe had replaced Marathon in the Steam top 10 for weekly active users in the U.S. That’s not good. You can already start to feel some of this in longer queue times for matchmaking as new modes continue to split the player-base.
So the question becomes: how aggressive should Bungie get with its user acquisition strategy? Does it try to run a free weekend and hope it convinces a bunch of new players to buy the game afterwards? Does it embrace free-to-play in the hopes that the player pool spikes and everyone starts buying more skins from the in-game shop? Or is the right move to just play the long game and keep trying to slowly increase sales of the $40 game every quarter while a small but dedicated group of diehards buy weekly skins?
A free sponsored kit mode vs full-blown free-to-play
One suggestion from Marathon players is to to make just the game’s popular new “free kit” mode free to everyone to try. “Bungie should make sponsored kit playlist/BR a free to play game mode so new players get a taste of the greatness that is Marathon,” wrote theoriginalkd on the subreddit over the weekend. “F2P sponsored kit playlist could go insane,” another player responded. “One of the few suggestions I’ve seen here that I think could actually go a long ways to helping the game.”
I don’t know the answer to these questions. I am not paid to know the answers to these questions. But I do play a lot of Marathon and would very much like to continue enjoying it and get to see what Bungie has planed for the game in future updates. I will say that going free-to-play these days seems increasingly fraught, especially for a game that is clearly a premium product and designed with a premium price in mind.
“We’re hoping that what we’re showing is exciting enough that someone is going to take the leap with us, but we are also committed to delivering on seasons past this that will continuously offer to evolve the game without an increase to the box price,” game director Joseph Ziegler said last year. “Everyone’s got their own definition of what is the right price.”
The microtransactions in Marathon are very limited and, to be honest, it’s hard to see them becoming a much bigger, more involved part of the game given how important stealth and not being seen by other players is to the overall moment-to-moment gameplay. Branded crossovers, the golden goose for most freemium games, would be impossible in Marathon, and not just because its beautiful aesthetic and excellent sci-fi worldbuilding are too precious to have that inflicted upon them.
But it’s also clear Bungie needs to do something to try to juice Marathon’s momentum, especially going into season 2. The friends I play with every night are as passionate as ever about their time with the game thus far, but increasingly reaching their burnout threshold with the existing progression systems, maps, and all of the loot and upgrade resets promised for next season. A free weekend might be the best way for Bungie to test the waters without damaging the game’s existing value proposition.
