Bungie’s extraction shooter Marathon continues to struggle with player retention five months after launch. The game recently dipped below 1,000 concurrent players on Steam for the first time, hitting a low of 987 according to tracking data shared across the community. Its 24-hour peak has also hovered in the low 3,000s, a far cry from the nearly 88,000 concurrent players it reached during its opening weekend in March.
The decline has been steady and severe. After a launch peak of around 88,000 on Steam, monthly highs fell to the mid-30,000s in April, then continued downward with only temporary bumps from Season 2 content. By late August the game is regularly seeing concurrent numbers under 3,000 outside of peak hours. Across all platforms the picture is not dramatically better, with daily active users having settled far below the early post-launch figures.
Sony has publicly described Marathon as "retaining players and gaining new users" on a consistent basis. That statement has been met with widespread skepticism given the visible Steam charts. When a live-service shooter is regularly sitting under a few thousand concurrent players on its primary PC platform, claims of healthy retention become difficult to take at face value.
The comparison to Destiny 2 remains particularly painful for many longtime Bungie fans. Even after the studio ended major content support for Destiny 2 and shifted focus to Marathon, the older game continues to draw significantly higher concurrent numbers on Steam. At various points Destiny 2 has maintained five to ten times Marathon’s active player count despite receiving no new seasons or expansions. The phrase "Destiny 2 died for this" has become a recurring reaction whenever Marathon’s numbers take another hit.
Marathon launched into a crowded extraction-shooter space and faced immediate questions about long-term engagement. While the core gameplay earned generally positive reviews at launch, the steep drop-off suggests the loop has not proven sticky enough for a large portion of the audience. Seasonal updates have produced short-lived spikes, but the baseline continues to erode.
Bungie has already undergone significant restructuring, including substantial layoffs, in the period surrounding Marathon’s development and release. The studio’s future now appears heavily tied to whether it can stabilize and grow the Marathon player base. Season 3 will likely serve as a critical test. If the next major content drop fails to reverse the trend, the conversation around the game’s long-term viability will only intensify.
For a studio that built its modern identity on Destiny’s persistent universe, watching the successor project struggle while the older game still outperforms it is an uncomfortable reality. Marathon is not dead (yet), but its current trajectory is a clear warning sign. The numbers do not lie, and right now they show a game that has lost the vast majority of its launch audience with no clear recovery in sight.
What are your thoughts on the article? Do you think they will pull the plug on Marathon soon? Let us know your answer in the comments!