Bungie has launched Marathon to a tune of round 90,000 concurrent gamers on PC, however is it sufficient to compete towards rival ARC Raiders?
Marathon is out within the wild, however how is it faring amongst gamers? (Picture: Bungie)
Bungie’s Marathon launched final Thursday, opening the floodgates on one other new extraction shooter for followers to sink their tooth into.
It arrives at a tumultuous time for live-service shooters with Highguard asserting that its servers will likely be going offline simply over a month after launch. Evidently if these bold video games don’t herald an enormous viewers from the get-go, publishers don’t see a lot level in preserving them going for lengthy.
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So, after a full weekend to permit Marathon to breathe, how is it fairing towards its major competitor ARC Raiders? The outcomes are in, and it’s not trying completely promising.
On its first day of launch, Marathon achieved a peak participant depend of 88,337 on Steam. Simply shy of 100,000 gamers, that’s 38% lower than the entire variety of Steam gamers who logged in to play the free server slam.
Contemplating Marathon has a £34.99 entry payment, that’s not a nasty conversion fee. It’s additionally a damn-sight more healthy than Sony’s final live-service shooter experiment – Harmony solely managed 667 gamers on Steam at anyone time.
Nevertheless, in comparison with ARC Raiders, Marathon is lagging a good method behind. Whereas it was thought that Marathon may pull a couple of gamers away from ARC Raiders, Embark’s extraction shooter nonetheless pulled in over 200,000 gamers on March 5, 2026.
Since then, it’s solely seen a rise in participant numbers with roughly 235,000 gamers logging in on the similar time on Sunday afternoon. Up to now, it doesn’t seem like Marathon is taking the extraction shooter crown any time quickly.
So, the query now stays whether or not the present quantity of gamers is sufficient to hold Marathon going. We gained’t know console numbers till Sony publishes gross sales knowledge, but when the sport’s subreddit web page is something to go by, it seems that the sport is holding up pretty healthily.
One participant who logged over 30 hours within the recreation since launch says they’re ‘excited for the long run’. The put up reads: “I believe it’s kind of of a lukewarm launch, but when they work arduous at it, I believe they’ll flip this recreation into one thing actually superb.”
Different players stay involved as as to if Sony will hold the sport going if it will probably’t pump its numbers up greater.
“I simply suppose persons are scared as a result of the video games trade is in a particularly unstable state proper now the place it doesn’t really feel like there are clear indicators as as to if a recreation has a future or not,” one put up on Reddit reads.
“Marathon being an superior recreation that has captured the hearts of its fan base not being “the subsequent huge factor” most likely simply frightens some individuals as a result of we really do not know what the discussions behind closed doorways are like and whether or not or not Sony is pleased with the launch, and even what their expectations had been.”
For now, it seems that Bungie is all-steam forward on supporting Marathon with stay service content material. Season 1 is already underway with a second and third season scheduled for later within the 12 months.
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