Marathon may have surpassed 1.2m sales worldwide according to analyst estimations. Of that number, the majority appear to be present on PC, rather than PlayStation.
These figures come courtesy of Rhys Elliott, head of market analysis at Alinea Analytics. In Elliott’s latest Substack post, he establishes that Bungie’s latest extraction shooter has surpassed an estimated 1.2m sales and $55m in revenue (without counting microtransactions).
Of those sales, Alinea Analytics believes around 800,000 of those sales are from Steam, 217,000 on PlayStation 5, and 133,000 on Xbox Series X/S. That’s just under 70 percent of players on PC, while PlayStation players make up around 19 percent, and Xbox takes the remaining 11 percent.
This is noteworthy as Bungie is a first party Sony developer, so the substantial difference between PC and PlayStation figures is especially interesting. Add on reports from March indicating Sony was ditching its PC release strategy for its single player games, while multiplayer releases like Marathon and Marvel Tokon will of course remain on PC. Given the popularity of Sony multiplayer titles on PC, you can perhaps glimpse why.
Back to Elliott’s post, he suggests that the first impression experience for new players is perhaps less approachable than its main competitor: Arc Raiders. To support this hypothesis, Elliot points to the player growth following Arc Raider’s popular Server Slam. On the other hand, Marathon’s own Server Slam didn’t have the same effect. The argument being, while many people tried Marathon out early, many didn’t stick around for the full release.
Elliott does however follow this up with some good news for Marathon’s longevity. Those who stuck with Marathon have been locked in for the long haul, retaining a healthy estimated 380,000 daily active users. Again, Steam is the big hitter in this area, with the average playtime among Steam users sitting at 27.8 according to Elliot, whereas PS5 and Xbox comes in at 16.5 and 17.3 hours respectively. The game seems to have serious hooks!
There’s also interesting crossover between other Bungie games and extraction shooters. On Steam, Alinea Analytics claims 78.2 percent of Marathon players have played Destiny 2. In addition, 62.7 percent have played Helldivers 2, 55.9 percent have tried out Arc Raiders, and 52.3 percent have leaped in from Halo Infinite.
These figures, per Forbes’ Paul Tassi, are close to the accurate, internal figures at Bungie according to his sources. Tassi writes in his own report: “There are no plans to scale back or change content plans from here, as of now. That may change, but work is underway on future seasons, and the ultimate fate of the game will play out in time. Again, this was never going to be a Highguard/Concord situation, and it was ridiculous to think so. That doesn’t mean Marathon is the true hit it needs to be, but that’s a different conversation.”
So it’s an interesting release to say the least. It does appear that Marathon’s quirks have resulted in many players bouncing off it, but as a game able to keep players invested around for a while, maybe in time it’ll continue to attract a growing audience. One hopes Sony doesn’t pull the plug prematurely, especially at a time when the company seems keen to kill off its studios such as Dark Outlaw Games.
