A game like Marathon had to be stress-tested before launch, and Bungie finally has a clear early positive signal. The open test event, Server Slam, runs from February 26 to March 2 to get the servers ready ahead of the March 5 release, and it opened with a day-one peak of 143,621 concurrent players on Steam, according to SteamDB. With launch now close, that’s the kind of number Bungie needed on the board.

Some people are already comparing it to Arc Raiders’ open beta, the extraction shooter many see as the current genre leader, which reached a peak of 189,668 players. If Marathon’s curve behaves in a similar way, it could translate into a strong release, but the real verdict arrives when the game launches on March 5, 2026.

Is Marathon Censoring Arc Raiders?

The day also came with a peculiar controversy. During the first hours of Server Slam, several players noticed that the name “Arc Raiders” appeared censored in the in-game chat. The first widely shared example came from streamer Lirik in a clip, and PC Gamer verified the behavior independently – with both “Arc Raiders” and the word “Raiders” getting blocked, before the issue later stopped happening.

What made it stranger is that other competitor names like Call of Duty or Escape from Tarkov showed up normally. Bungie appears to have fixed the problem quickly: the Marathon dev team replied on X with a screenshot showing “Arc Raiders” written without censorship, after Jake Lucky posted another clip of the same issue. The most surreal detail is that Bungie paired the mention of Arc Raiders with the label “genius”.

The team also acknowledged that some player names were being automatically changed to “Redacted”, which could be tied to the same filter system. Even with the hiccup, Marathon climbed into Steam’s top sellers before Server Slam even started, overtaking Arc Raiders on that list, as seen on Valve’s store charts.

If you’re wondering what’s inside the test, it includes two maps – Perimeter and Dire Mash – plus five contracts. You can try it right now on Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.

Source: 3DJuegos