While Bungie has been seeing a decent level of success with its PvPvE extraction shooter Marathon, former business director of Square Enix Holdings, Jacob Navok, believes that Sony seems to have little faith in the game. Taking to social media, Navok wrote about the concurrent player numbers for the Steam version of Marathon, and noted that the floor for peak concurrent players might be going lower and lower thanks to a lack of any marketing attempts by Sony.
“Nearly 2k loss in peak in 24 hours,” he wrote. “Brutal. I had thought the floor was 15k, could be looking at a 10k floor.” He went on to point to the fact that Sony hasn’t been using its marketing capabilities with the PS5 dashboard to push Marathon. “Sony owns a ton of digital estate on the PlayStation dashboards to push Marathon,” he wrote. “Its lack of marketing push to support the numbers speaks to the lack of faith from the platform holder.”
Interestingly, another social media user – DomRock – replied by noting that the most-played game on Xbox throughout April has been Marathon. They also said that the game would likely enjoy better marketing if Bungie were owned by Microsoft rather than Sony.
“The #1 most played game by hours on Xbox this past month was Marathon,” they wrote. “If [Microsoft] owned it, it would be the biggest game since Halo. Sony doesn’t even try. MS would have it front page, and on Game Pass indefinitely. Marketing was non-existent. The least they could do is free for PS5.”
A report from last month indicated that, since its release, Marathon had sold around 1.2 million copies at the time. According to Alinea Analytics, the game has made Bungie around $55 million in gross revenue. When it comes to platform splits, Steam seems to have been the best-performing for Marathon, with an estimated 800,000 copies sold. The same estimates put PS5 in second place with 217,000 copies, and Xbox Series X/S in third with 133,000 copies. Analyst Rhys Elliot believes that a first-party release by a Sony-owned studio not being able to break the 20 percent mark on PS5 is a “notable data point.”
“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 Elliott. “PlayStation Studios online games will almost certainly continue being multiplatform (despite Sony reportedly pulling back on PC releases).”
The analyst has pointed to Marathon‘s player acquisition being slower than that of another notable PvPvE extraction shooter, ARC Raiders. A key problem has seemingly been UI/UX issues, which led to a 49 percent increase in sales following Marathon‘s server slam.
“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.”
For more details about Marathon, check out its latest update from earlier this month. Also, take a look at our review.
