1 Month Later, Marathon Numbers Remain Deeply Worrying For Bungie...

TL;DR

Marathon's declining player counts, weak sales of 1.2M copies, and Sony's silence suggest Bungie's live service is failing to meet corporate expectations.

Key Points

• 1.Marathon's Steam numbers show a continuous downward trend one month post-launch. Current 24-hour peaks sit around 28,325 players with roughly 17,000 active, and the combined player count of Marathon and Destiny 2 together falls short of Destiny 2's lowest historical lows (~46,000–60,000).
• 2.Marathon has sold approximately 1.2 million copies across all platforms. Around 800,000 were on PC/Steam, 217,000 on PS5, and 133,000 on Xbox — but Sony and Bungie have not publicly celebrated these numbers, signaling they fall well below internal expectations.
• 3.Arc Raiders, a competing extraction shooter, is outperforming Marathon on both Steam and Twitch. Arc Raiders maintains hundreds of thousands of returning players and averages ~33,000 Twitch viewers, versus Marathon's average of only ~5,000 Twitch viewers.
• 4.Twitch viewership for Marathon has been plummeting, reaching only the low 5,000s. This is critical because live-service games depend on content creator engagement to sustain player acquisition, and Marathon is failing to hold that attention.
• 5.Cheater infestation is accelerating player loss in an already fragile game. Because Marathon is a hardcore extraction shooter where mistakes cost all loot, perceived unfairness from cheaters is especially damaging to retention.
• 6.Bungie and Sony face a crossroads: double down on Marathon or pivot to Destiny 3. Given Sony's $3.6 billion acquisition cost, a history of shutting down underperforming studios like Bluepoint, and Marathon's niche appeal, the analyst Riss Elliot and the video author both argue Destiny 3 is the safer path forward.