Bungie‘s game has become the subject of a data war driven by the self-interested use of player numbers. The launch was neither an undeniable success nor an absolute failure – it is not the next Apex Legends, but it is certainly not a new Concord situation either. And yet everyone has found their own truth in the numbers, which is precisely what makes it so sad.

Anyone who had been paying attention to the video game industry in recent years knew that the launch of Marathon was going to be controversial. The game arrives after Bungie went through a colossal internal crisis and, as if that were not enough, it opted for the most radical artistic direction possible. The fact is that the game’s debut was, for lack of a better word, average. It was not an undeniable success nor an absolute failure: it is not the next Apex Legends and, of course, it is not a new Concord case.

Since nobody was entirely right, one might imagine this situation would serve to moderate discourse and foster a more open mind when discussing Bungie‘s extraction shooter. What has happened, however, is exactly the opposite. Since we are in no man’s land, users have tried to turn player counts into a weapon to throw at each other. Some mock the fact that the game failed to maintain the numbers from its open beta, others say player numbers have dropped 50%, and a third group denies everything and insists the data is worthless.

Steam Data and the Reality of Marathon

There is no universe in which achieving more than 85,000 concurrent users on Steam on day one is bad news, especially for a game that is also available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series. For a paid game, it is a figure that guarantees Marathon will have a future. Bungie has earned enough money to justify long-term development and has a user base that, if they improve their poor microtransaction system, will likely incur recurring spending and keep the title economically afloat. It is like drawing nil-nil away from home in the first leg of a knockout tie: the win has not been secured yet, but it is quite possible.

Right now, though, it is still too early to talk about player retention. Comparisons need to be fair and there is not enough data to make them. You need a case as dramatic as Highguard, which lost 80% of its players in three days, to draw quick conclusions. The point is that sometimes the answers simply are not there. Will Marathon‘s comeback continue, or is the game doomed to remain mediocre? Right now the only way to answer that question is through personal hunches and, while everyone is entitled to an opinion, it is worth exactly as much as it can be backed up with arguments.

It would not be right, however, to be convinced by the idea that data is worthless. This is a narrative that has resurfaced and that developers from Overwatch and Warframe have somehow joined. The reality is that, when used properly, data is one of the most powerful tools available to players – and by extension to journalists – to understand the state of the industry or a given company. The author’s colleague Mario, for instance, saw the Splitgate: Arena Reloaded disaster coming a long time ago, and in recent months there have been discussions about the troubles at Battlefield 6, whose developers were hit by layoffs just this week.

The problem with data is knowing how to interpret it. Right now, for example, a downward trend is being observed with Arc Raiders. Does this mean the game is a failure, that servers are going to be shut down, or that Embark needs to close up shop? Not at all. What it does show is that players are not happy with the content of recent updates. At the same time, it also helps us understand, for example, why a game as old as The Witcher 3 – still with daily peaks of more than 15,000 concurrent players on Steam – can entertain the idea of releasing a DLC ten years after launch, something that would be unthinkable for any other single-player title.

It is also worth mentioning that Highguard will close without having publicly committed to refunding the money of those who bought cosmetics to support its launch. In this sense, the simultaneous player graph probably led some users to decide not to buy skins, which, in hindsight, was the right call. In a world where developers give their live service games less time than ever, users cannot be blamed for looking at the data and making decisions. Nobody wants to start playing a declining game, commit to it, and then watch both their time and money go down the drain with a server shutdown. It is a story we have seen repeated over and over again.

It is terrible that numbers are used as weapons to throw at each other, and the author himself made mistakes interpreting them in a piece about Palworld that still haunts him. However, it would be naive to think that blocking access to data would improve things. The narratives would be there regardless and, rather than being easy to fact-check with a tool to combat lies, everything would become a matter of perception. Perhaps it would be much healthier, both for developers and players, not to be swept along by the echo chambers and radicalized opinions that social media has become. Saying that Marathon has been a great success or a great failure is an attempt to deceive people, because even a game this colorful can live – at least for now – in shades of grey.

Source: 3djuegos