Marathon sold just 1.2 million copies with nearly 70% on Steam, analyst estimates: "It hasn't exactly made the splash Sony and Bungie wanted"

Analyst Rhyss Elliott of Alinea Analytics estimates that Marathon has sold 1.2 million copies across PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC, with the overwhelming majority of those sales coming from Steam.

In a report posted to X/Twitter, Elliott reckons Marathon "hasn't exactly made the splash Sony and Bungie wanted, even if the game underneath the surface is a MASTERWORK of design." Our Marathon review, sitting pretty at 4.5/5, is in agreement. (I love it, too.)

"A little under 70%" of Marathon sales came from Steam, he says, while PS5 "takes about 19%" and Xbox has "a bit over 11%," which is unusual for what is technically a first-party title. Sony owns Bungie, even if Marathon was also a multiplatform simultaneous release.

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This would put Marathon's Steam sales around 800,000. SteamDB's three owner estimate plugins are close to Elliott's report, guessing 835,100, 848,500, and 1.14 million owners. Classic Steam sale napkin math – multiply the reviews by 30 – gives us 884,640. It's not an unreasonable figure.

Elliott tackles "why Marathon hasn't hit the same stratosphere as Arc Raiders," which reached 12 million copies sold at the start of year. Obviously, Arc Raiders has been out a lot longer, but at the same time, Marathon has not put up anywhere near the same Steam player counts.

"My answer: Players understand the Arc Raiders loop within 30 minutes, while Marathon's UI acts as a massive filter, chewing up newcomers and spitting them out before they can experience the depth of Bungie’s signature gunplay and Marathon's awesome gameplay loop," he says.

On top of the UI and Marathon's development issues (not that Arc Raiders didn't have its own production hurdles), I'd also point to general approachability. Marathon is, quite intentionally, a hostile and intense experience. It might be the most intimidating game I've ever played, especially solo. Arc Raiders helped grow the extraction space by making the genre more welcoming and giving it a PvE story generator, while Marathon embraces cutthroat aggression and leans into lose-it-all PvP. You have to love the pain.

"The Steam copies sold during each game's respective Server Slam paint a picture there," Elliott continues. "Arc Raiders saw a massive 80% jump in copies sold during its three-day Server Slam. Marathon, meanwhile, saw a 49% increase in the four days following its Slam (Day -7 to -3)."

With Steam being such a major platform in this report, it's worth looking at other stats sourced from SteamDB today:

• Arc Raiders Steam player peak - 481,966 (four months ago)
• Arc Raiders Steam 24-hour player peak - 125,795
• Marathon Steam player peak - 88,337 (19 days ago)
• Marathon Steam 24-hour player peak - 44,371

Reported play times and slowing CCU decline suggest that the folks who've broken through Marathon's wall are having fun and are here to say, Elliott finds. PvP games can be sticky, and Marathon will stick to you like hot tar if you let it.

"After peaking at 478K total [daily active users] on its first Saturday, Marathon has settled into a respectable rhythm, holding 345K DAUs as of yesterday and averaging 380K DAUs across the weekend," he adds.

"On Steam, Marathon’s average playtime has climbed to 27.8 hours, significantly outpacing the console averages on PS5 (16.5h) and Xbox (17.3h). Even more telling than the averages: 22% of the Steam audience has surged past the 50-hour mark, and nearly 7% have already logged over 100 hours."

For most games, these would be incredible numbers. For Bungie's only non-Destiny release in over a decade, developed by a team based in the costly Bellevue area and which reached hundreds of developers over the course of more than four or five years, released at a time when Destiny 2 itself is facing the sort of player dip that Bungie once defined as game-threatening, these numbers look less than incredible.

But that comes with a few caveats, as we can't just estimate profits at 1.2 million multiplied by $40, the base cost of the game. These are unofficial figures, they don't reflect other forms of monetization (the battle pass, premium skins, and so on), and we don't know how much has been taken out for platform fees. We don't know Bungie or Sony's internal targets, nor can we pinpoint the game's development budget. But Elliott's assessment, not a huge splash, especially on PS5, feels fair.

"We've sportified Steam charts" according to Warframe boss, who sees gamers obsessing over player counts the way "baseball freaks" dig into batting averages.