Bungie’s newest live service extraction shooter had a decent launch, but it may be on the brink of losing crucial player count. On pre-release, the game got dogpilled by online users with a bunch of recently released live service games, which failed.
PlayStation’s Concord was the game that kickstarted the discourse around live service shooters, finally running its course for a lot of people. After that game shutdown, the mobs moved on to Highguard, which was bashed for the same reasons.
Thankfully, Bungie’s Marathon seems to have gotten past most of its initial hurdles. But there’s still the issue with online mobs ganging up on it, but there’s a considerable number of people who love the game.
Marathon’s development cost was over $250 million
Bungie is a company that has a history of designing great games and a loyal fanbase, so no amount of internet pushback is enough to make the makers of Halo and Destiny 2 shutdown there newest efforts so easily.
What should be a problem that the company should start thinking about is the declining player count of the game. According to a new report by Forbes writer Paul Tassi, Bungie had a budget of over $250 million for Marathon.
But it has not been consistent in charting the top spot in the Steam player count. It was the 106th most-played game on Xbox. Only PlayStation 5 is the platform where it was on the list of the top 10 games on launch.
Marathon is more competitive than fans expected it to be
Paul argues that several factors could be responsible for the decline in numbers. One of the primary ones is the game’s competitive difficulty. Marathon was designed with the Esports ecosystem in mind.
Presently, it has several skill checks, and even if the visual flair can be super appealing for a lot of people, the novelty wears off if you try to play it for casual fun. Add to that, the game has a massive issue with cheaters in the higher ranks, which is annoying for the competitive crowd.
Online reactions to the game’s issues and the news around its budget are mixed among doomposters. Some are actively hoping for its downfall, but all is still not lost; the game is well past its ‘Concord 3’ slander phase.
A lot of people are still hoping for the game, even for solo quests, because of the unique kits of the shells. Now, all that remains is to have constructive support, because Marathon is yet to prove itself as a dominating force in the current lineup of extraction shooters.
