Paul Tassi shared an interesting note regarding Marathon.
He revealed this on Twitter:
This video isn’t only about Marathon, but as an addendum I can confirm from Bungie sources that Steam is the primary platform for the game, not console, though some may already have figured that out.
If true, then Marathon cannot be compared to games like Overwatch or Fortnite. Overwatch in particular only has a small fraction of its playerbase on Steam, so SteamDB does not accurately gauge the rest of players on consoles, Epic Game Store, or Blizzard.net.
In his video, Tassi argued that even if bad actors are weaponizing Steam player metrics, they are still a valid source of publicly available data to gauge a game’s performance.
As of this writing, Marathon seems to still be going steady with a 24-hour SteamDB peak of 62,495 players. Whether it ultimately makes enough money to break even for Bungie and Sony remains up in the air, especially with games media reviews still not populating to give it MetaCritic and OpenCritic metascores.
But it would be fair to say that it has a fighting chance.