Eleven years after its release, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has more players than Bungie’s Marathon on Steam by nearly three to one. At the time of writing, CD Projekt Red’s 2015 RPG sits at 12,784 concurrent players, while Marathon is at 4,550 with a 24-hour peak of 5,257. For context, Marathon’s all-time Steam peak of 88,337 came four months ago during its launch window, which puts the current count at roughly 5 percent of that high.
Marathon launched on March 5 at $39.99 on PlayStation 5, XBOX Series X|S, and Steam, and its Steam numbers have moved in one direction ever since. We covered the game’s first major update as player numbers slid back in March, when its 24-hour peak dropped nearly 30 percent inside the first week, and Bungie later opened the game to everyone with a free Open Play Week to kick off Season 2 in June. Whatever bump that produced, it hasn’t held.
The comparison gets rougher when you look at what else is beating Marathon’s concurrent count right now. Russian Fishing 4 is at 6,106, the mobile-born MMO MIR4 is at 5,281, Crosshair V2, which is a crosshair overlay tool rather than a game in any traditional sense, is at 5,093, and Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! is at 4,873. Even Guild Wars 2, an MMO that launched back in 2012, is ahead at 4,869.
None of this is a new storyline for Bungie’s extraction shooter, which has been fighting the numbers since its first week. Slay the Spire 2 launched the same day as Marathon and more than doubled its concurrent players, and in my Slay the Spire 2 first impressions, I said that a roguelike deckbuilder from a small team dwarfing a AAA shooter from the original creators of Halo says a lot about the state of the industry. Four months later, the gap has only widened, and it’s hard to say how long Marathon is going to last with numbers like these on Steam.
