Bungie’s Marathon was supposed to be one of Sony’s big live-service success stories. Just five months after launch, though, the numbers are looking pretty grim.
The extraction shooter launched on 5 March 2026 and peaked at 88,337 concurrent players on Steam the following day.
Fast-forward to August and SteamDB is showing only around 4,000–4,500 players online at a time — a fall of roughly 95% from its launch peak.
Season 2, updates and even a free week don’t appear to have produced the sustained comeback Bungie would have hoped for. Reports in July were already describing the player base as collapsing as questions continued to mount over Bungie’s live-service strategy.
Interestingly, this isn’t necessarily because everyone thinks Marathon is a terrible game.
Its overall Steam reviews remain Very Positive, with more than 80% positive reviews, although recent reviews have slipped to Mixed.
That arguably makes the situation even more interesting.
Bungie has produced a game that plenty of its players seem to enjoy, but apparently not enough people are sticking around to support the sort of huge live-service ecosystem Sony and Bungie were presumably hoping to build.
And after the spectacular failure of Concord, Sony really didn’t need another expensive multiplayer game struggling to retain players.
So what went wrong?
Was the extraction-shooter market already too crowded?
Did Bungie misjudge what players actually wanted?
Or is this another example of publishers chasing the live-service dream when gamers are increasingly reluctant to commit hundreds of hours to yet another endless multiplayer game?
Can Marathon still recover, or are we already looking at one of the biggest gaming flops of 2026?