While Bungie may have faced a few rocky months with questionable PR leading up to the launch of PvPvE extraction shooter Marathon, the title has seemingly turned out to be quite popular. According to Alinea Analytics, as caught by VideoGamesChronicle, around 1.2 million copies of Marathon have been sold so far, making Bungie around $55 million in gross revenue.
The analytics firm also believes that most Marathon players—just shy of 70 percent—are on Steam, with an estimated 800,000 copies sold on the platform. PS5, on the other hand, is estimated to have sold around 217,000 copies, and Xbox Series X/S around 133,000 copies. The firm believes that PS5’s player base not even accounting for 20 percent of the total is a notable data point, since Bungie is a first-party studio under Sony.
“Marathon is technically a first-party Sony title, so seeing the home console struggle to break 20% of the volume is a notable data point for the ongoing platform-agnostic debate,” wrote head of market analysis Rhys Elliott. “PlayStation Studios online games will almost certainly continue being multiplatform (despite Sony reportedly pulling back on PC releases).”
Bringing up comparisons with Embark Studios’ ARC Raiders, the analytics firm noted that the server slam events for both titles resulted in wildly varying player sentiment. This has seemingly led to Marathon acquiring players at a slower rate than ARC Raiders, which saw plenty of positivity following its public playtest. Marathon managed to see a 49 percent increase in sales following its server slam, which Elliot notes might come down to the game’s UI/UX issues and more complex onboarding.
“Bungie could have had more time to fix the onboarding process had the beta happened earlier,” wrote Elliott, “but Marathon launched three days after the beta finished. These factors limited the launch sales quite a bit, I reckon.”
As for how it has been doing since launch in terms of player numbers, the research firm says that Marathon has “settled into a respectable rhythm,” managing to get around 345,000 daily active users. Other interesting metrics include the fact that 22 percent of the Marathon player base on Steam has spent over 50 hours with it so far, and 7 percent has seemingly spent over 100 hours. Elliot believes that this might be down to players understanding the appeal of Marathon better the more time they spend with it.
“This data suggests that once the Bungie magic clicks, it hooks players deeper than the average extraction shooter,” Elliott wrote.
Marathon was released on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S earlier this month. Since then, Bungie has continued to support it with post-launch updates. The biggest one of these has been the introduction of Cryo Archive, which features high-end loot that players get to fight over. For more details about the extraction shooter, check out our review, where we gave it a score of 8 out of 10. And while you’re at it, take a look at our thoughts about why the game always feels like it’s in trouble.
