Based on data from March, it appears that the new game from the team behind Destiny isn’t as popular on its “home turf.”
Marathon, Bungie’s new rescue-mission shooter and the studio’s first title unrelated to the Destiny IP since the original release in 2014, has received a lukewarm reception. Although critics have praised the game, it appears to have failed to achieve sufficient commercial success. The ongoing debate over concurrent player counts on Steam only fuels the negative sentiment surrounding Marathon. Although we’ve seen estimates of Marathon‘s sales, we don’t have exact numbers because Bungie and PlayStation haven’t released them yet. Thanks to Circana, however, we know how Marathon performed on the US sales charts. Last month, an estimate put sales at 1.2 million copies, but there are no concrete figures.
Another estimate comes from the analytics firm Ampere Analysis. In a broader overview of console-exclusive games and discussion of PlayStation’s strategy of releasing its own titles on Steam, Chris Dring, editor of The Game Business, stated that, according to Ampere, Marathon attracted more than 2.2 million players in its launch month. This includes 1.1 million PC players, 660,000 PlayStation 5 players, and 525,000 Xbox Series players. It’s not surprising that there is such a large difference between the number of PC and console players. Previous reports have already indicated that Marathon is more popular on PC. Thus, it’s not surprising that the number of players on Steam is nearly equal to the console player base.
Interestingly, Marathon “attracted” this many players even though the game isn’t available on streaming services or for free. The 2.2 million players likely represent 2.2 million copies sold. This suggests that sales reached the millions in the month of the game’s release. If Marathon has indeed sold more than two million copies, even if that’s fewer than PlayStation and Bungie expected, it would be nice to see a statement from either party celebrating the game’s success. This would be preferable to the silence and constant online speculation that the game is already on its last legs.
At least Bungie is communicative with its players, releasing regular updates that take the community’s feedback into account. These updates constantly evolve the gameplay. The latest update, for example, granted players one free entry per week to the endgame raid, the Cryo Archive, making it more accessible to those who want to try it out without devaluing what players love about it: how difficult it is to access and survive the Cryo Archive.
Source: WCCFTech, The Game Business
