Are Steam player count numbers indicative of success? Does a massive drop in concurrent players spell doom for a competitive online game? Will “countwatching” the SteamDB numbers for a game make you more appealing to women? According to the devs behind some of the most popular multiplayer shooters on Steam, the answer to all these questions is “no,” with a side serving of “touch grass.”
Marathon, Bungie and Sony’s $40 extraction shooter reboot, released on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and Steam on March 5, but a free “Server Slam” taster of the game ran from February 25 to March 2. The Marathon Server Slam pulled in a concurrent all-time player peak of 143,621 on Steam, yet the full release has only reached an all-time peak of 88,337 players. That’s just over half! The game is a failure! Bungie is cooked!
If that sounds like a ridiculous reach to you, I suggest not searching for the word “Marathon” on X, the Everything App, because “everything” evidently includes absolutely braindead takes. Admittedly, there are some contributing factors to this debate (if you can call it a debate) gaining traction.
First and foremost, the recent announcement that Highguard, a game that peaked at 97,249 all-time players on January 26, will be permanently shutting down on March 12 has definitely exacerbated things. The comparison between the player count of Marathon, a game backed by Sony and developed by the studio behind Halo and Destiny, and that of Slay the Spire II’, an early access title developed and published by an indie studio, has also been a topic of ridicule online.
There are countless extenuating reasons as to why these are all stupid bits of information to compare against Marathon. Highguard is a free-to-play game, whereas Marathon costs $40. Slay the Spire II is currently only available on PC, whereas Marathon is multiplatform. However, as spotted by PC Gamer, Dylan Snyder (Overwatch’s senior designer) makes a far more compelling argument against countwatching Marathon’s Steam numbers: it’s cringe.
“Is the 50% player drop in the room with us right now?” Snyder posted on X, alongside an image of someone comparing Marathon’s Server Slam numbers against those of its full release. “Feel free to dislike and pass up any game you want, more power to you, but this is big unemployed, maidenless behavior…”
Snyder isn’t the only developer to comment on the debate, as Warframe’s creative director, Rebecca Ford, also chimed in. “Naming the next Warframe we release ‘Player Count’ to pollute the searches and defend against the discourse.”
“When Warframe released we had 435 other titles [to] compete with for the attention of millions of Steam users,” Ford continued in a separate post. “Now games have 20,014 other games in the same year for many millions of Steam users that have already been exposed to 80,000+ prior releases they might have liked.”
Ford’s point is especially pertinent when you take a look at the SteamDB numbers for the original Slay the Spire. When it was released into early access on Steam on November 15, Slay the Spire hit a whopping, massive peak of 153 players. In December, it crept up to 3,206. By February 2018, it was all the way up to 33,086.
Deep Rock Galactic was released in early access on February 28, 2018, to a concurrent peak of 2,869. In February 2026, its concurrent peak on Steam was 38,489. Among Us dropped on November 16, 2018, on Steam and reached a concurrent peak of 20 players. In September 2020, it reached an all-time peak of 447,476. If you want an example of a huge IP from a big publisher, Bandai Namco’s Dragon Ball FighterZ’s 24-hour player count peak is 811 players. Surely the devs have abandoned it by now, right? Nope, Bandai announced that a new DLC character is coming out in roughly two months.
And y’know what, I think Snyder is onto something here, because I can practically feel myself Animorph-ing into a cockroach as I stare at these SteamDB charts. Marathon might fail. It also might jump up to being the highest- charting Steam game in history next month. It will most likely just peak and trough over time, though, which is a far less exciting outcome than the doomers on X are expecting.
