Marathon
Bungie
New figures are circulating around the internet about Bungie’s Marathon, waiting to be dissected for analysis, something to chew on besides just Steam Charts. The information is from Alinea Analytics, a firm specializing in game markets that has estimates of the Marathon’s sales, DAUs and platform splits.
While some may dismiss this as third-party guesswork, rather than being official from Bungie that is…unwise in this context. My own sources at Bungie have now confirmed to me that these numbers are very close to the real figures, meaning they shouldn’t be rejected out of hand. Here are the Alinea figures (I cannot report exact totals):
1.2 million estimated sales (at its $40 price point + deluxe)
Steam is 70% of Marathon’s population (in line with my last report that Steam was the primary platform for the game). PS5 is 19%, Xbox is 11%. It’s notable that PS5 doesn’t even break 20% for a first-party game, despite being multiplatform.
After a peak of 478K DAUs in its first weekend, it’s holding 345K DAUs, while this past weekend was 380K. Comparing launch weekend to this past one, two weeks later, it’s a 20% drop, though more if we’re doing day-to-day.
The report also says average playtime is up to 28 hours on Steam, much higher than consoles. 22% of Steam players are past 50 hours and 7% are past 100. This is in line with the positive reception of the game from players who have stuck with it.
The sales, platform split and DAUs are very close to reality over at Bungie, I’m told. The problem is…this is lower than it should be in general, from launch figures to now, given the context of the game, meaning its development time, cost and expectations from Sony for Bungie’s first new IP in a decade. That is also reality.
Marathon
Bungie
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.
Bungie has not shared any sales numbers since launch, and I doubt we will be hearing anything official from them any time soon on either the sales or active players end. But this estimate and my confirmation of its approximate accuracy are the best we’ve got.
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