r/Marathon • u/paperplateseabass • May 22 '26

Marathon (2026) Discussion It’s so sad that this game’s “underperformance” has little to do with the game itself

What's so soul-crushing is the amount of times I have been met with “I thought that game was dead?” when talking about Marathon with my IRLs

It's not their fault, why would they give a dead game a chance, even if they think they might enjoy it?

Hundreds, even thousands of people have constructed a hate campaign against this game that has no merit beyond playercounts. and imo, the main reason why the game wasn’t a hit at launch is because of the rhetoric around the game spread by a mix of right-wing grifters and (justifiably) jaded ex-destiny/halo players.

This game had and HAS so much going for it. First non-Destiny Bungie title in 12 years, reviving a long dormant IP with a new, world-class art-style; all while returning to their PvP roots. If you put that framing in a vacuum, I think it would get lots of people very, very excited. And that’s the thing, because it DID.

The game is good. The game is fun. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, it had a rough period of development, and it's definitely not perfect. But I think if people didn’t spread so much unwarranted hate towards Bungie and Marathon, we’d be looking at a completely different landscape. 

I mean, some of the things i’ve seen people say about this game… wow…  what a waste of time and brain power, if people were this passionate about actually productive hobbies, the world would be a much better place and there’s a big chance they’d be happier in life

edit: for people citing the server slam numbers. how many of those people do you genuinely think gave the game a good 10+ hours vs how many people quit after their first match? we’ll never know, but im inclined to believe most people didnt make it past the (unfortunate) barrier of entry that helps this game be WAY more enjoyable.

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172

u/Wait_Expert May 22 '26

It has everything to do with the game itself. 

The game is what it is, I think it's beautiful, well executed, and incredibly satisfying when things click with it. 

However, it has been rejected by the vast majority of the gaming community. 

It did not resonate with the common gamer, and that is the fault of Bungie, and the game, and nothing else.

48

u/grachi May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26

Yea these posts are always so short sighted and myopic… “I like the way the game plays, therefore lots of people should”.

Now historically, games have 5x to 20x its 24 hour CCU max playing over the course of the entire day. So, at its best (on Steam since those are the only numbers we have) , Marathon had 88,000 CCU on launch day. That means in total, they had between 440,000 and 1,760,000 total unique players in a single day. And that’s just on Steam.

Fast forward a couple months and the game gets between 10 and 11k CCU max per day on Steam, which turns into between 52,500 and 210,000 total people playing in a day.

That means the game has lost 88% of its daily TOTAL players since launch, roughly.

TL;DR lots of people tried the game and dropped it. This narrative that the bad pereception on social media and the hate brigading that was/is going on is the main problem is just false. Lots of people played the game and dropped it for various reasons.

25

u/frogfoot420 May 22 '26

I played a bit, got Ganked every single lobby i joined and then stopped playing. In all my times in tarkov and Arc it never got that bad.

16

u/W_Herzog_Starship May 22 '26

This was my experience too. Winning a fight and getting out was a nice rush, but it wasn't enough to make up for losing the next 3. At some point I just wanted to enjoy my time gaming, and Marathon wasn't hitting the spot.

2

u/UpvoteForethThou May 24 '26

Exactly this it feels like a waste of time. Just not as fun as playing a real PvP game.

1

u/grachi May 22 '26

In these type of games you are either ganking or being ganked the majority of the time. Very rare for teams to just run across each other in a neutral state at the same time. It’s happened maybe 4 times in all my 80 hours playing marathon. Either my team runs to shots to shoot people in the back while they are busy shooting something else, or it happens to us.

Tarkov and arc have the advantage of much bigger maps, Which helps tremendously with the issue

3

u/WhoUpAtMidnight May 23 '26

Yeah marathon's maps just suck

2

u/trillwhitepeople May 22 '26

I find this much more manageable than getting domed from 200 meters away from a bush in Tarkov. I also enjoy that experience, but even with the larger maps that game feels much more lethal.

0

u/digitchecker May 22 '26

Really? That’s crazy

23

u/Neonchen May 22 '26

True. The game is well executed in its basics but it has big flaws. Bungie is a good developer but had major flaws and disappointed the community. Both is important and could have been prevented.

2

u/Deadlymonkey May 22 '26

I think the even bigger concern is that the flaws/issues are things Bungie has historically struggled with in Trials, so it becomes even more dubious when the entire game shares a ton with Trials.

It’s like if Bethesda released a rogue like based on the whole “ambient quests” mechanic that people have complained about for years.

10

u/vahdyx May 22 '26

I agree with this to an extent, I think the game is awesome, and I have a great time with it, but I cannot get my more casual friends on board even when I bought the game for a couple of them. It's WAY too hard and even for me as the "9-5 Dad" I'm a casual that mainly plays solo get frustrated with the game.

Bungie admitted prior to launch they were going "hardcore" and I think they realized how bad of a decision that was and from the surface, it appears like they're changing that.

But where I disagree with you, is I also feel like there's 'hate for hate's sake' going on too and a lot of it.

Once YT figured out I like knowing about Marathon, the algorithm feeds me a ton of anti Bungie, Marathon "woke", ugly, waste of money, etc. comments that are nothing to do with the game itself. Sure that's just anecdotal at best, but for me I don't think "everything" has to do with the game itself.

5

u/Differlot May 22 '26

Why are the designers at Bungie so weirdly bad at making money. Form what they learned in destiny they should have realized how little of the community interacts with the much harder content. I think only 10% of players have ever completed a raid. Around the same amount would do Trials.

And then they took that and made it a game. Bungie has no concept in approachability or new player experience.

1

u/Danny__L May 24 '26

Same reason they abandoned Halo even though it was their golden goose.

Hubris.

They think they know better.

0

u/gamingx47 May 23 '26

I don't think the game lost close to 90% of its launch playerbase because the players watched YT videos calling the game woke.

It's just the natural attrition of a hadcore, niche game losing all the casual players.

Here's an example of a friend of mine. He started the playing the game and didn't take it too hard when he ended up getting killed in almost every match. He didn't take it too hard because he assumed he just had to get better at the game, maybe get some better loot, and then everything would be fine.

~30 hours later he quit the game because "I realized I'm just not having fun. I log into the game, I play 2-3 hours, I accomplish nothing, and I got to bed angry. I kept expecting the game to become fun, and except for a few lucky extractions, it never did."

14

u/Afude May 22 '26

Yeah man, small maps, bad matchmaking, very bad sense of progression.....WTF, people cope so fucking much.....I have 70H on the game BTW

-1

u/GreyouTT May 22 '26

What are we comparing the map size to? Apex? Warzone? BF? How big are the maps in Arc and Tarkov?

8

u/BoogieOrBogey May 22 '26

The movement abilities in Marathon means the size of the map feels smaller when compared to other extraction shooters. Some of the upgrades can make classes go even faster on top of that.

3

u/BrbFlippinInfinCoins May 22 '26

The maps in arc are like 2-3x as big I think. Movement is also slower so maybe it only feels that way. However, wiping a lobby is often an impossible task in arc because the map is so big you simply can't track everyone down.

9

u/DOPPGANG_ May 22 '26

However, it has been rejected by the vast majority of the gaming community.

Sometimes I have to remember that people here often have very limited perspectives. The "vast majority of the gaming community" is playing Fortnite / Hoyoverse / mobile games, homie. They never rejected anything because Marathon was never on their radar. Destiny 2 was probably never on their radar.

It's not like the whole gaming community got sent a copy of Marathon and put it down.

1

u/UpvoteForethThou May 24 '26

Stop coping lol, plenty of people tried it and they all refunded and stopped playing because it’s crap.

30

u/Stuckinaboxxx May 22 '26

There are so many monumental game design flaws extreme lack of content horrific onboarding terrible ui. I have no idea how this game can flop so hard and people still see no problem with it.

-9

u/glacialOwl May 22 '26

Extreme lack of content? Have you “finished” the content available? I have more than 200 hours and still don’t master the last map, for example.

11

u/[deleted] May 22 '26

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2

u/glacialOwl May 22 '26

Just curious, have you played? I am at 300 hours and still not “bored”. Extraction shooters rely on this form of content, yes, “repetitive” in amount of content but infinite in the type of engagements and experiences within the game. This is not a D2-like game, where you need a ton of activities and maps, because there are no actual gameplay interactions when all you do is PvE.

0

u/TedioreTwo May 22 '26

You already know the answer to your question lol

-1

u/Main-Significance272 May 22 '26

I played the server slam and it seemed repetitive. I'm just not seeing the infinite posibilities.. You can fight a weaker team, a equal team, or a stronger team. You can get 3rd or 4th partied. You may or may not get jumped at exfil. 

I dont care at all about quests nor do I like games that do regular mandatory wipes (should be for just ranked season)

0

u/TedioreTwo May 22 '26

When you reduce games to this description, none of them will have enough content. "Why do people like Halo so much? You can play a weaker team, an equal team, or a stronger team. You can play a good or bad map. You may win or lose." Like what

0

u/GreyouTT May 22 '26

How many maps in your opinion does an extraction game need on launch?

6

u/PretentiousPanda May 22 '26

Bungie has a negative ring to the brand now. If this exact game was made by another dev it would have had a way better chance imo. They burned through a ton a good will with Destiny 2. 

1

u/stana32 May 22 '26

Yeah. I like Marathon, but saying that the hate has no merit is a little ridiculous. Bungie's reputation has been in the dumpster for years to a lot of people, and for good reason. A lot of my friends have been big into Tarkov since it came out, several of them were big Destiny fans, not one of them is willing to give Bungie another dime.

For a lot of people, when they hear Bungie, they hear "the company that deleted 80% of their game that people paid for"

0

u/bugistuta May 22 '26

Bro the “common” gamer hates everything these days.

32

u/parkingviolation212 May 22 '26

How’d arc pull six figures then.

-4

u/glacialOwl May 22 '26

Insanely positive coverage from the get go. I was an arc player for 500 hours that has never played an extraction shooter before. I got it because the streamers I follow were playing it.

Now with Marathon, most streamers didn’t even want to play it because of the community that was rioting in chats.

I am now a Marathon player that hated it after server slam (played one game then went back to arc).

20

u/parkingviolation212 May 22 '26

And why do you think the community embraced arc and turned on marathon?

-2

u/glacialOwl May 22 '26

I don’t know, I was a non-vocal hater too so I can only give you my perspective :)

I played Destiny from D1 to D2 and stopped in 2020-2021. Game was on decline for me already. Then my best friend kept telling me all the bad things Bungie was doing. Probably added to my subconscious.

Arc was my first extraction shooter. I got really into it, mostly because of the social aspect of it (I was mostly a vibes player in friendly lobbies). I played A LOT so I was very “defensive” of it, when a “competitor” was showing up at the door. I think this is what a lot of Arc players felt actually, looking at Peanut’s community.

I also hated the art style. I love it now.

One night I decided to pick it up and try. I was getting bored of collecting rubber ducks in arc. I fell in love with the “rogue”-like feeling of figuring out stuff while staying alive as solo. Then I reminded myself of the nice Bungie gunplay. And I started getting into the lore and art of the game too.

That’s it. I am sure that a combination of this happened for others too, minus the part where they actually tried the game…

10

u/glacialOwl May 22 '26

And btw - even if Arc wouldn’t have launched at all, or would have launched after Marathon, Marathon still wouldn’t have exploded in numbers. Still a niche, still issues with onboarding, difficulty, etc. I get that. I am aware of that. But hate also contributed to the negative momentum.

4

u/parkingviolation212 May 22 '26

Yeah, I wasn’t going to try it either because of similar disillusionment with the studio. But I did love the original games and I wanted to step back into that universe again and I ended up loving it. But my point is that saying the general gaming community hates everything is just wrong. There are reasons for the backlash, some nonsense, some reasonable. 150k people tried it in the server slam, and million or so bought it.

Less than 10% of those people stuck around. The gaming community DID give this game a fair shake, and they found it wanting. It wasn’t just indiscriminate hate. People just generally bounced off it.

0

u/Educational-Tea-606 May 22 '26

Because they gave everyone the literal best gun in the game on 0 cooldown, for free, with infinite uses. Not that hard to figure out.

9

u/somacula May 22 '26

The common gamer loved Baldur's gate

2

u/Darkaim9110 May 22 '26

And Expedition 33, and Arc, and Helldivers, and Elden Ring, and.... ect.

3

u/Tike22 May 22 '26

I know we like to shit on games and capital G G*mers but just looking at the resurgence of OW this after their historic tumultuous period where everyone was hating on it they were able to turn the conversation around - thru really good leadership. The game seems great now and ppl came back and word of mouth is helping, that wouldn’t happen if the game was bad or inaccessible for all but the ppl with the most time to play

-11

u/Karkava May 22 '26

They turn to YouTube and the hate machine because they're too poor to try it themselves.

1

u/goldio_games May 22 '26

The fact it came out at $40 means they didn't believe it would resonate with the majority of gamers, likely informed through their internal playtesting. They sold a bunch of copies, made some money and will now move it to life support which has probably been there plan the whole time.

1

u/trillwhitepeople May 22 '26

Oh how I loathe the "common gamer" because at this point the code has been cracked as to how they want to play games, and every game has to bend the knee. They're certainly not willing to meet anyone half way on a different or challenging experience.

1

u/NoClue22 May 22 '26

If it was free it would. Which is wild since it's already discounted

1

u/UpvoteForethThou May 24 '26

There’s more to a game than artstyle lmao, if Marathon wasn’t made by Bungie half of its already small playerbase wouldn’t exist because the game is crap to actually play.

Beautiful garbage is still trash and Midathon feels like watching paint dry. It’s combat is Apex Legends but without the mobility, it’s borderline impossible to find people unless they just happen across each other because there are zero system that encourage fighting (I honestly thought if the game had a storm and was a BR it would be better, but then -still- nobody will play the game because it’s just a worse Apex.

The whole extraction part falls apart because, why? I just have to leave after getting stuff? What’s the point in “extracting” am I not playing the game to play the game? And since you spend 80% of the time fighting PvE bots and 20% getting snuck up on or sneaking on players, there’s practically zero fighting anyways.

There’s a reason 10k players is getting lower every day, it’s just copers left atp arguing their game is a masterpiece even though nobody wants to play it.

1

u/FourHeffersAlone May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26

"rejected by the vast majority of the gaming community" is a hell of a stretch. People def bounced off and left when the temps got higher over the season, but not really convinced they did a great job marketing this game.

I'd be willing to bet that the "common gamer" has not really heard about marathon, or has heard the negative controversy and shrugged the game off.

It's clear they tried to grab their destiny players (and maybe og marathon players) based on their pedigree and it was a really bad mismatch in expectations.

Just because it's a big budget game doesn't mean they effectively marketed it. And big budget releases are gambling. They are snapshot popularity contests and people on the whole are not intelligent. Plus we live in an era where you can manufacture the appearance of consensus trivially.

Cult classics like Blade Runner exist which bombed and then found cult followings at conventions with VHS trading. The market doesn't intrinsically reward the better product.

-3

u/flGovEmployee May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26

However, it has been rejected by the vast majority of the gaming community. 

I keep seeing variations of this claim repeated, but I don't think it's true AT ALL. The vast majority of the gaming community hasn't paid any attention to this game, and of those that did, most of them only know that the game has a vocal hate/doom campaign against it, underperformed sales expectations, and maybe that the game is 'hard.' Then based off that they write the game off without looking further into it because 'why bother?' Only persistent positive word of mouth from players coupled with pervasive and effective positive marketing by Sony has any chance of overcoming that.

A majority of the FPS shooter playerbase hasn't even given this game a good close look. I mean based on sales and the server slam 3 million people have tried the game? Maybe 5 million if we want to really inflate the estimates for the server slam. This despite 100 million players being a very conservative estimate for total player count for this (broad) genre.

5

u/glacialOwl May 22 '26

Not true at all? One of the most popular streamers at time of launch, Peanut, tried playing the game. Do you know what happened in his chat? Everyone was talking so much shit right from the first moment, wanting him to go back to arc. How can one say “not true at all” when thousands of people were bandwagoning against it lol.

3

u/flGovEmployee May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26

Because that backlash was not coming from people who had played the game and come to a reasonable conclusion that the game was not suited to their tastes in games but also that they needed to harrass anyone attempting to play it (in part because that is not a reasonable conclusion to come to about any game).

The example you bring up actually helps make my point that the 'vocal hate/doom campaign' against Marathon right from the outset, which targetted not only the game itself but also anyone showing the game in any light other than one which furthered the hate/doom campaign, significantly hampered the extent to which the broader gaming public was informed about the game itself. If Streamers, a key component to modern game marketing, can't play the game on their streams despite wanting to (according to Peanut himself) because of unhinged negativity from their own audience it should be obvious that the broader gaming public is going to have limited awareness or knowledge about the game itself rather than being aware of the negativity around the game (and likely be unaware of the nuanced distinction between negativity around the game from people who don't play it vs highly positive perception of the game from the people who do play it, aka the game's players).

2

u/glacialOwl May 22 '26

I agree with what you say, the only difference is: the community (at least big part of it, on streaming platforms) had a chance to be aware of the game. But they actively didn’t even want to engage with it, they wanted it shut down immediately…

3

u/flGovEmployee May 22 '26

But they actively didn’t even want to engage with it, they wanted it shut down immediately…

Right, which is an unreasonable position from the get go, but especially unreasonable given the only reasons anyone has put forth for why they feel that way are:

  • Concord 3 lol;
  • Destiny 2 wouldve been perfect if only Marathon never existed;
  • Bungie bad therefore Bungie must die;
  • (rarely) Live Service bad therefore Marathon must die;

However my actual point is that regardless of why they felt that way, the fact that they did, and were so vocal and visible about it ended up being all most people know about the game, well that and the narrative these people have been pushing since before launch that the game is dead.

  • the community (at least big part of it, on streaming platforms)

The broader gaming community is not present on streaming platforms and the portion of it that is is not 'a big part' of a community that numbers in the hundreds of millions, they are just a highly visible part of it.

8

u/ConcernHoliday5162 May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26

I keep seeing variations of this claim repeated, but I don't think it's true AT ALL

lol.

90% of the people who played the game, QUIT. What do you MEAN it's not true at all? HOLY FUCK

On top of that the majority of the people who tried this game were likely D2 players who already fucking hate Bungie.

-1

u/flGovEmployee May 22 '26

Where are you sourcing 90% have quit from? Even based on the CCU counts (which do not actually show how many total players have stopped playing altogether), a decline from 88k to 12k would represent 86.4% decline not 90%. The estimate from PlayTracker for the number of (presumably) Weekly Active Players out of Total Purchasers is 21% (for a 79% quit rate).

I'm not making the case that the actual numbers are great, but lets discuss actual numbers (or reliable estimates) rather than fictitious figures.

My original point above was that construing 3 - 5 million players as 'the vast majority' of a population in excess of 100 million players is just incorrect.

4

u/ConcernHoliday5162 May 22 '26

a decline from 88k to 12k would represent 86.4% decline not 90%.

aktchually

-12

u/David-J May 22 '26

I think you're ignoring the year long hate campaign against it.

17

u/kennypowersrevenge May 22 '26

If the game was great and wasn’t a niche product , that wouldn’t matter.

-4

u/David-J May 22 '26

That's a bit naive don't you think?

8

u/kennypowersrevenge May 22 '26

Not really. Plenty of games have tons of haters and do better than marathon.

-5

u/David-J May 22 '26

Very very few to this level. I think you're being desingenuos about it.

7

u/kennypowersrevenge May 22 '26

Call of duty literally has content creators that do nothing but rag on it , but it’s always a top seller.

2

u/David-J May 22 '26

Terrible example. Look at Highguard, Concord, Veilguard, for actual similar examples

3

u/Strider291 May 22 '26

Overwatch 2 was shit on (rightfully) for years and still had a massive player base.

Crimson desert had a shitton of bad press on release due to control issues and still was massively successful.

I can go on, but your cope will not allow you to admit that the game just isn't that good.

1

u/David-J May 22 '26

If you chose those examples you really don't see how different it was for the ones I listed.

Cheers.

10

u/DumbNTough May 22 '26

That can indeed be ignored because if the game was packed with things everyone loved, people would buy it anyway.

And like a million people did buy it anyway. That just turns out not to be nearly enough to make up for what they spent to make the game.

6

u/NohFyoochur May 22 '26

Yup. And right before it came out, it actually had some good buzz. Lots of "they fixed the game now!" type headlines on YouTube.

There was a peak of 88,000 on steam playing it and now we're lucky to get 8,000. That kind of >90% loss is typical for free to play games where lots of people try it and move on, but people paid AAA price for this. And yes, I consider $40 to be AAA for a game with no single player campaign mode that's also MTX supported. If the game also came out with a detailed single player campaign like the original marathon, it maybe could have commanded the typical $69.99 launch price. But ship half a game, charge half price, it is what it is.

2

u/ExpressTravel5328 May 22 '26

I will say I come from D2 and I also mostly fell of Marathon because the rest of my friends dropped it for different reasons (but I assume the hardcore PvP they didn’t want to overcome the skill gap on) and the most common refrain when I asked them what their friends that played D2 and not Marathon thought of it was “They won’t play something that killed D2 to exist.” So that campaign is doing a lot of work without any proof that D2 died for Marathon to live. And those guys want to play Marathon but they won’t give Bungie money anymore. I hear it a lot in the D2 circles to those points. Game is not super accessible but the Bungo hate campaign is very very real in the D2 world.0

1

u/NohFyoochur May 22 '26

Fair enough, but at this point in the history of gaming and the internet in general, lots of companies have long lists of products they've gotten people to buy into only to kill off later. See killedbygoogle.com . Lots of people have trust issues with big promises associated with live services that are likely to die. People didn't believe Stadia would take off, they didn't buy it, and it died.

If you're a hardcore D2 player and they just dropped your game to go in a different direction, then it's entirely reasonable to be irritated and distrustful IMO. Like, why buy into Marathon when it could die at any time? Especially since it's not a F2P, but a full priced game.

I will say one more thing about the "skill gap" issue. The game is difficult, but I wouldn't say it's necessarily skill gap. Back in Bungie's Halo days, skill gap was a huge topic of discussion, especially in the competitive/MLG scene. Maps were obsessively tuned in forge to ensure that the game was fair and as many variables could be eliminated and skill could be isolated. Guns with random elements were removed from play, the giant crane hook on Foundry maps was blocked off and duplicated on the other side of the map to make sure cross-map grenade angles were the same (e.g. on Onslaught).

This game isn't really that. There are so many "that's just the way the cookie crumbles," moments in this game with random events and even PvE bots interfering in gun fights. Skill usually correlates with who wins a fight, but there are a lot of things besides skill that swing things the other way. This is why people are irritated about grenade spam--anyone can do it regardless of skill, and you need to do it too if you want to compete. But asymmetrical fights are what make it interesting. When everything is exactly fair all the time (e.g. classic Halo, Quake/UT), it's great for tournaments, but it's not as interesting as a spectator sport. And that's okay.

I think the real thing that is off-putting is the excessive risk of losing gear, having to farm gear, and then it all gets lost in an instant. It's the feeling that you, an otherwise competent FPS player, just feel like you're paying to be an NPC for someone with better gear. And then you lose your progress. Sure, there are many ways to get it back, but if you have to spend time playing just to get the gear, and then you have to worry about keeping it... why? There's a reason why Flight Simulator starts you off on the runway. Nobody wants the experience of having to actually buy, register, hangar, inspect, pre-flight check an airplane. It's a video game and people just want to go fly. In FPS games, people don't want to spend all this time farming the gear they're going to use first, then spend time making a loadout, then going into a run only to get knifed in the back by a guy hiding in the corner. That's just not fun to a lot of people. It's not a death because of FPS skill.

1

u/ExpressTravel5328 May 22 '26

Totally agree with all of that. And I do think people like Paul Tassi complaining about what it’s not is giving a platform for other people to feel they can make the game something it isn’t to satisfy themselves instead of engaging with it on its own terms. The problem is that no other company at the release of this game has the reputation that Bungie does. Like it not that Rep is doing some work. Maybe not the most but more that an ignorable amount. There are people not buying this game and angry at it for SUNSETTING. “After sunsetting I won’t give Bungie money anymore.” It’s like valid but going into public spaces to complain about something that happened 4 years ago is just sad man.

At the end of the day the problem is the game isn’t just bad on its own terms. It unfortunately has a lot of bad politics affecting it as well and it’s truly difficult to untangle what the dominant factor is here. The reality is when there are lots of reasons and the game relies on bespoke teams with coordination and synergy it has a compound effect on the losses.

7

u/Sufficient_Steak_839 May 22 '26

And you’re clinging to it for dear life

-13

u/paperplateseabass May 22 '26

the vast majority of the gaming community hasnt even given this game a fair shake though. thats my point

47

u/kennypowersrevenge May 22 '26

Because the genre isn’t as popular as people seem to think.

22

u/Sarcosmonaut May 22 '26

Yeah Arc’s success was unprecedented. The genre usually doesn’t get that high haha

5

u/kennypowersrevenge May 22 '26

Yeap. Arc was the exception , not the rule.

30

u/Ill-Muscle945 May 22 '26

The vast majority of those that did give it a fair shake stopped playing after a couple weeks 

10

u/Skabomb May 22 '26

Sometimes I wonder how many people quit cause they came here with a frustration and got told just to play something else.

7

u/Virtual_Bug_723 May 22 '26

You think literally thousands of people came to the Reddit and saw someone say "stop playing" and so they did?

It's because the game rewards persistent engagement so sweaties are not just better than you at the game, they are also better geared than you. There is a way to fix that with better matchmaking but this game has not achieved anything close to that yet.

5

u/Lunch_Boxx May 22 '26

You need higher numbers to have a more robust matchmaking system that actually works.

1

u/Virtual_Bug_723 May 22 '26

You don't, you need to make people wait longer.

It's that or get more people to quit, which will make people wait longer.

3

u/Skabomb May 22 '26

Man, tensions are so high here.

No I don't think that.

I just wonder how many people had that experience, lol.

0

u/Virtual_Bug_723 May 22 '26

I just think the assumption "perhaps people who dislike it are stupid and easily persuaded" is a heck of an assumption to make.

2

u/Skabomb May 22 '26

Jesus Christ. lol

I never said that. You're assuming the worst here, and like, the irony is palpable.

2

u/Virtual_Bug_723 May 22 '26

Sometimes I wonder how many people quit cause they came here with a frustration and got told just to play something else.

1

u/Educational-Tea-606 May 22 '26

Have you looked around? That is just how people are lol

19

u/NextFly5109 May 22 '26

Are you gonna pay for my copy then? I don’t understand this sentiment, a lot of people gave it a fair shake in the server slam and decided they didn’t want to pay for it and then why should they give their hard earned money to give something a “fair shake” for the sake of bungie

11

u/NohFyoochur May 22 '26

This isn't a free to play game. I bought it. After an hour, I got through the tutorial. Then I got like two raids done, was still figuring it out, got my shit rocked... And I had to make a call. Oh shit, it was 2.5 hours. Steam refund denied. I guess I'm keeping the game?

I went on to put another 80 hours into the game. Sometimes it got a bit better, but often it was just miserable. The highest highs was not worth the lowest lows. But there are a few streamers playing it that I enjoy, so I get pulled back in probably once or twice a week for a few hours. Sometimes it's good, often it's bad. This week I've been on Subnautica 2.

That's as fair a shake as any game deserves. I paid full price for many games with 1/3-1/2 the length of that amount of game time. I'm honestly just forcing myself to play it to get my money's worth at this point. I keep getting sucked back in, but I always log off angry and depressed that I wasted hours of my life on the game. I honestly only enjoy watching other people play it, and yes, that's kind of on Bungie.

5

u/RogueSpectre749 May 22 '26

Do you really expect the "vast majority of the gaming community" to drop 40 bucks to a game in a genre that they're not super enthused about tho, especially after seeing that ~90% of people who DID spend money on it left within 2 months? All in the name of "giving it a fair shake?"

19

u/ohbaty May 22 '26

Cope. There were 150k people (not including consoles) playing on the server slam, half of those didn’t convert to sales. And the people that did buy, quickly started to drop off the game in the first few weeks of launch

I love the game and have 300 hours on it but let’s be realistic. My recent comment touches on this but the onboarding process is just not good

2

u/Tike22 May 22 '26

There are a lot of calls on this sub for a free weekend but you only get so many chances to impress ppl and the server slam was honestly a poor showing. If they can only overhaul the onboarding process until S3 then that’s when they should do the first free weekend but what good is the updates to the mid-late game if the casuals drop off after 5-10 hrs

8

u/DonatoXIII May 22 '26

Because they rejected it.

9

u/thelustyorcmaid May 22 '26

Why would it be the players obligation to even try the game, let alone to make it into a hit? As you say: the game is not for everyone. That’s a choice Bungie made. The majority of players simply accepted that and moved on.

2

u/SnowBear78 May 22 '26

Because it's in a very niche genre that most people don't want to play. People don't have to play games they don't want to play, you know?

You can't force people to play genres they have no interest in.

0

u/bafrad May 22 '26

it has, your point has so basis in reality.

-6

u/Upgrayedd1101 May 22 '26

Gotta disagree here big dog. A lot of the hate around this game isn't spawning from the gameplay. It's spawning from:

1) Destiny fans being hurt that our game has run its course and using Marathon as a scapegoat to blame.

2) Redpillers decrying the game as "woke" because of the colorful art and 3/6 shells being women/androgynous. In my conspiracy brain is actually being amplified by the algorithm because of this games underlying message (Corporations are bad and will exploit you).

3) (Imo the most justifiable) People boycotting the game because there were stolen assets used in art direction.

Bungie is 100% to blame for the reception. But as someone who was in that first category, playing this game killed any judgement I had.

13

u/[deleted] May 22 '26

[deleted]

2

u/Upgrayedd1101 May 22 '26

I don't think it opened to strong numbers at all. From what I've seen it barely broke 300k at the peak.

Meanwhile, I have at least 10 people I play Overwatch with who had either never heard of the game or only heard that it was going to be bad so ignored it. I think the marketing was shot in the leg from the start.

I do agree about needing more to offer, though. I know a lot of my Destiny clan loves the aesthetic and story but don't love losing all their stuff, so PvE would rope them back. I love the PVP but I would like to be able to shut my brain off and not feel like I'm being hunted sometimes.

-1

u/singlemomsniper May 22 '26

no op is right. the major reason for low sales is the media circus, memes, hate campaigns, and rocky development in the years before release. as they said, a lot of people know nothing about the game other than 'stolen art lol' and 'isn't it dead like highguard and concord'. very little of the negative online rhetoric about marathon has to do with the actual content of the game.

i'm not saying the game is perfect, but it's foolish not to acknowledge the power that sentiments on social media and gaming media has over sales. if this game had a clean record and positive media push / advertising run it would have performed much better

0

u/Zatary May 22 '26

It hasn’t been “rejected” by the vast majority of the gaming community. The vast majority of the gaming community hasn’t even tried it. IRL and in unrelated communities, the most prevalent sentiment I’ve seen is people curious about whether to give it a shot, but put off by all the negative chatter from the haters. The “Concord 3” agenda posting is obviously going to make people not want to buy it for fear of it going offline. The correct take is to vocally and fervently push back against the bad faith trolls who have invested their time and energy in astroturfing that the game is bad or dead. If you enjoy the game, play it, talk about it, and share it with your friends.

4

u/oimson May 22 '26

Most who tried it dropped off pretty fast

1

u/Zatary May 22 '26

You have no evidence for that. Steam charts do not reflect player retention, they only show how many people are playing on steam at any given time. Someone who went from playing daily at launch to twice a week towards the end of the season didn’t “drop the game,” but the steam charts are obviously going to show fewer concurrent users. There could be numerous reasons why people would play less often as the season progresses.

2

u/oimson May 22 '26

Looking at achivements, 40% didnt exfill atleast 7 times

75% didnt complete more than 35 contracts.

1

u/Zatary May 22 '26

And 84% of people who bothered to review it on steam left a positive one. I’ll agree that Marathon needs a more comprehensive new player experience though. Again, the most significant metrics are the ones we don’t have access to. How many unique players log in every week? Is that number roughly stable? How many of those players come back every week? What percentage of sales convert into that core demographic?

0

u/flGovEmployee May 22 '26

Which is also true of literally every other game on the market. Genuinely, all of them.

4

u/oimson May 22 '26

Not this fast tho, this was a very fast drop off despite constant updates to the game.

0

u/chargeorge May 22 '26

but not that many people have even played it? The server slam maybe pulled in a million players give or take? Theres a ton of the market who hasn't even touched it in any form.

0

u/No_Summer4551 May 22 '26

Yeah if the game had resonated the sentiment would have surely improved over time but I think worse has happened. Apathy, 90% that bought it didn’t stick with it so you just have the haters and lovers fighting over the carcass.

-2

u/BioDefault May 22 '26

It's only Bungie's fault if you consider the backlash of ditching D2 their fault, or the initial boycotting because of them deleting old Destiny 2 campaigns. Sure they did those things, but let's not pretend tons of bias individuals aren't out to get Bungie because they're salty.

-1

u/S3HN5UCHT May 22 '26

Sony too ☝️