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Marathon releases to 87,000 players on Steam and 87% Positive Reviews (sponsored by coachmcguirk91)

coachmcguirk91 said:
Marathon probably had 400 people max that worked on Marathon at one time. After release, most likely that number is halved. Bungie has been a multi-project studio for a long time. Sony will also back Marathon to see if it can gain ground in the long term
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Well, all we can do is wait and see.
 
MMaRsu said:
Team Bondi created LA Noire.

Chinatown wars is a small game

Midnight Club and in general arcade racers have been dead for years.

What do you guys want? Mediocre mid AA titles from Rockstar or bangers like RDR2 that takes years to create.
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"Game XY doesn't count because reasons"

Pathetic.
 
Sohurmk833 said:
Nah. The sad part is that these mountains of GaaS slop got developed in the first place. The (western) industry is in a bad place and for it to recover the cancer needs to die. And Bungie/Marathon is part of that cancer.
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Trust me when I say this GAAS isn't the problem the single player games would be trash too based off the developers….
 
Reviews are coming and are brutal. For how useless review of a GAAS game are (more than for other games), they'll generate more negativity.
 
Shubh_C63 said:
Just out of curiosity, how many months or Seasons does Marathon has to last for people to realize Ok maybe this game isn't going down.
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For me, it's a matter of if and when Sony announces more Bungie layoffs and them getting fully absorbed by Sony. We will know the success or failure once we see what future plans Sony has for Bungie. If things are going as badly as they seem then layoffs are coming.

The real issue isn't whether or not the game completely burns to the ground, it's whether or not they can keep enough people playing and buying $15 cosmetics in the shop to keep it profitable. Sony isn't going to just keep throwing money at a game that is losing money every quarter, that's not how this works. They're not in this for the game, they're in it for the money.
 
Shubh_C63 said:
Just out of curiosity, how many months or Seasons does Marathon has to last for people to realize Ok maybe this game isn't going down.
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Dont think its going down. Bungie and Sony have too much riding on this, as long as it wasn't a failure of concord proportions they'll try to salvage whatever they can. However, layoffs and reestructuring can and probably will happen.
 
The CCU chart for the game looks like a child's drawing of a mountain landscape.



UrNEo8JMRLzCqFle.png
 
I just don't understand how they spent all this money and dev effort on a small game with such niche appeal. Why is there not 3 other modes for people who don't like extraction? Why are squad sizes only 1 or 3? I think they fell into the trap of over engineering an experience for a specific group of people. A lesson that most studios learned with the e-sports crash 5 years ago.
 
Hari Seldon said:
I just don't understand how they spent all this money and dev effort on a small game with such niche appeal. Why is there not 3 other modes for people who don't like extraction? Why are squad sizes only 1 or 3? I think they fell into the trap of over engineering an experience for a specific group of people. A lesson that most studios learned with the e-sports crash 5 years ago.
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Remember when shooters during the 360 era had a full campaign and a slew of multiplayer modes? Hell; this very developer pioneered that package style. Now they want to release barebones games with limited scope in regards to actual gameplay variation and they expect gamers to bend over and accept it while they rake in the money whilst promising to finishing building the ship as you feed them more money.
 
Hari Seldon said:
I just don't understand how they spent all this money and dev effort on a small game with such niche appeal.
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DEI cost a huge amount of money. I don't want to get too political, but was a hearing this week about wasting tax money for make country maps 'more gay'. I can't even think how is that possible, but there is.
 
Branded said:
Just funny to see the goalposts move in real time.
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What's the goalpost moving here? The CCU?, it didn't crack 100k, it bounces between 20something-k to 50something-k at best, not reaching any new heights soon unless their update is so amazing wom turn the tides, you're acting like if people were all saying the game was gonna Concord and get shutdown the next day and since it didn't happen, we are moving the day it's actually gonna close for good, lmao
 
Hari Seldon said:
I just don't understand how they spent all this money and dev effort on a small game with such niche appeal. Why is there not 3 other modes for people who don't like extraction? Why are squad sizes only 1 or 3? I think they fell into the trap of over engineering an experience for a specific group of people. A lesson that most studios learned with the e-sports crash 5 years ago.
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CentralScrutinizer said:
Remember when shooters during the 360 era had a full campaign and a slew of multiplayer modes? Hell; this very developer pioneered that package style. Now they want to release barebones games with limited scope in regards to actual gameplay variation and they expect gamers to bend over and accept it while they rake in the money whilst promising to finishing building the ship as you feed them more money.
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The hardcore players traditionally are those who on average spend more in GaaS. So some companies prefer to focus on more hardcore audience because despite being smaller (which also means less server and user acquisition/ads costs) since they spend more, need less userbase/sales to make the games profitable.

That also partly explains why most GaaS are MP and in particular PvP (the other main reason is that MP makes the game less repetitive when you spend hundreds/thousands of hours on it).

Regarding why this gen AAA or in particular GaaS have a limited amount of modes/features/content at launch, there are three reasons:
  1. Every generation AAA budgets get more and more expensive, to the point that releasing to day a game with one mode and a few maps costs around 2x today than what a generation or two ago did cost to release a game with several game modes and two or three times the amount of maps. So to make games with all these features and content would get too expensive, something only a few would recoup
  2. Linked to the previous point, to partly solve the risk of huge budgets, one positive thing for devs that GaaS have is that instead of having to develop and spend the budget to build the whole entire vision of the game before launch, like in a startup they only release at launch a core minimum viable product that only requires a portion of that total budget of the whole vision. If it performs well enough, they keep adding the rest of planned different layers of features and content little by little if numbers continue being good enough. Meaning, the budget gets adapted to the success of the project, throwing to the garbage bin less work/money in case doesn't work. The post launch support gets periodically reviewed: if it becomes a huge hit plans get longer more ambitious, if it does just ok plans get less ambitious, if it performs under a certain line that justifies to continue supporting it, the post launch development ends and only server maintenance is left until the game doesn't generate enough to pay the servers, which is when the game gets shut down.
  3. Having more modes and maps means to split your userbase, for the matchmaking makes more difficult to find players of a similar level and the lowest ping possible to match you. So having everybody in a single mode and only split in a few maps makes easier to have better matchmaking and shorter matchmaking times. So it's better to start with less and once the games achieves certain userbase size, release more

coachmcguirk91 said:
Steam CCU's slightly outpacing yesterday. Is the playerbase stabilizing?
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Too early to tell, but it's likely.

Some gaming media reviews are starting to appear. If the main outlets end being as positive than the people who actually played it in PSN (4.65/5 stars) and -when filtering by more than 10 hours played, shows 92% positive- Steam (better than I expected, I thought the game was going to frustrating to the mainstream player but doesn't seem to be the case), then the game's userbase can get a micro bump.

Players are also collaborating in an ARG to apparently unlock the 4th map in some days, which could generate a bit of extra buzz that could help the userbase (mainly increasing user retention and bringing back some players who already stopped playing).
 
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EN250 said:
What's the goalpost moving here? The CCU?, it didn't crack 100k, it bounces between 20something-k to 50something-k at best, not reaching any new heights soon unless their update is so amazing wom turn the tides, you're acting like if people were all saying the game was gonna Concord and get shutdown the next day and since it didn't happen, we are moving the day it's actually gonna close for good, lmao
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Look what happened at EA just recently, the Battlefield team had big layoffs because the multiplayer wasn't bringing in the numbers and Marathons numbers are very similar now with it only being released 1 week ago 😬 to claim everything is going as planned it's crazy.
 
Hari Seldon said:
I just don't understand how they spent all this money and dev effort on a small game with such niche appeal. Why is there not 3 other modes for people who don't like extraction? Why are squad sizes only 1 or 3? I think they fell into the trap of over engineering an experience for a specific group of people. A lesson that most studios learned with the e-sports crash 5 years ago.
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i would be down for a deathmatch, capture the flag in the maps i played in teh slam. Too boomer i guess
 
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GermanZepp said:
i would be down for a deathmatch, capture the flag in the maps i played in teh slam. Too boomer i guess
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I assume they'll keep the old school modes to Destiny in order to differentiate both games.

Or who knows, maybe moving forward if Marathon gets successful enough they may also add it here too and try to focus Destiny in PvE and Marathon in PvP.
 
ShadyAcshuns said:
For me, it's not about the game, it's about the genre and the developer. I want them both to fail. I don't like seeing time and resources wasted on GaaS. I want Bungie and their like to leave the industry, along with their philosophy and activism. I'm quite surprised by the lack of disgust from the players who will continuously accept and defend anything they do: pull content, re-use assets again and again while calling it "new" , raise the price of battle passes constantly, lock other content behind expensive "deluxe expansions" like dungeon keys with armor that has extra skill slots not available to those who don't pay the extra nickel and dime.

They're just really awful to the players in general with their greed and political activism.
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Listen, I get it. I rode the roller coaster of all of what Destiny 2 was especially when they got rid of the red war and forsaken. I'd like to think that most of the management that was there during that period has moved on because the way they set up Marathon. It was more towards how the company itself operates and would be much easier manage. Expectations for what they wanted Destiny to be from the community and what they could actually do on an annual basis wasn't realistic. But if you wanna wash your hands a Bungie because of what happened there I totally understand. I like what Marathon is doing and I think it has a future as a fun game to play on the side.

ValiantInstance said:
It's sad that you think that and not because we're actually civilised and have no desire to spoil their thread.
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You parroted the same remarks days ago in this thread.

ValiantInstance said:
Leave the people enjoying the game to their own devices. Hell I created the BO7 OT so I appreciate that those threads are available as an escape from the viral internet pile-on.

Conversely there's also nothing wrong with us chortling in here enjoying the schadenfreude of another Sony live service flop, especially after they canned Bluepoint two weeks ago.
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EN250 said:
What's the goalpost moving here? The CCU?, it didn't crack 100k, it bounces between 20something-k to 50something-k at best, not reaching any new heights soon unless their update is so amazing wom turn the tides, you're acting like if people were all saying the game was gonna Concord and get shutdown the next day and since it didn't happen, we are moving the day it's actually gonna close for good, lmao
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LOL but the hate bandwagon DID beat the Concordian Timeline drum??? You were all expecting/hoping the game to crash and burn in the first two weeks and now it won't and now you have to analyze every single fluctuation in the CCU on one platform.

Shit's pathetic.
 
Hari Seldon said:
I just don't understand how they spent all this money and dev effort on a small game with such niche appeal. Why is there not 3 other modes for people who don't like extraction? Why are squad sizes only 1 or 3? I think they fell into the trap of over engineering an experience for a specific group of people. A lesson that most studios learned with the e-sports crash 5 years ago.
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Exactly like I'm being saying from the start, this "genre" is a ripoff because it has barely anything to do, this is not the 90s with people playing the same mode over and over again because there is nothing else to do, leave alone the majority that don't give a damn about extraction shooters from the get-go and on top of that a hardcore PvP one

The game itself and with that questionable art-style being the cherry on top, It's a mainstream repellent

If it wasn't made by Bungie, it wouldn't crack the 1k CCU mark
 
yurinka said:
I assume they'll keep the old school modes to Destiny in order to differentiate both games.

Or who knows, maybe moving forward if Marathon gets successful enough they may also add it here too and try to focus Destiny in PvE and Marathon in PvP.
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Yeah i might expressed myself poorly. In line with what other posters said maybe adding another mode would benefit the game. I read your anwers on that too. i tryed the slam because it was free but i have no interest on playing bungie/GaaS games even if are 10/10. Glad some folks are enjoying it. Not my cup of tea. I'm here for the memes.
 
Branded said:
LOL but the hate bandwagon DID beat the Concordian Timeline drum??? You were all expecting/hoping the game to crash and burn in the first two weeks and now it won't and now you have to analyze every single fluctuation in the CCU on one platform.

Shit's pathetic.
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Gonna Cry Tobey Maguire GIF
 
Destiny built a fanbase of collectors. It was the reason for the grind. Sony built a fanbase for single player gamers who relish story and drama. When the first wipe hits, I wonder how those fan bases will react.
 
Hari Seldon said:
I just don't understand how they spent all this money and dev effort on a small game with such niche appeal. Why is there not 3 other modes for people who don't like extraction? Why are squad sizes only 1 or 3? I think they fell into the trap of over engineering an experience for a specific group of people. A lesson that most studios learned with the e-sports crash 5 years ago.
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Because some suit saw tarkov rising 5 years ago and decided that this is new path forward without thinking about it for more than 5 seconds.

Marathon could work as small team game slowly building it over years etc. But this is literallly their new AAA game with full Bungie dev studio might which means it needs to be huge from start. And it isn't.
 
1 pm EST comparison.

37k today. Yesterday 40k. Another 7% drop. It peaked at 62.5k yesterday. Should drop below 60k later tonight at peak time.

Last night was server maintenance. But during the day it dropped 6% vs previous day. Now another 7%.

The lowest previous day bottomed at 22.5k. So less 6%, then another 7%, and today's low should be about 20k. Might break under at about 19k.
 
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StreetsofBeige said:
1 pm EST comparison.

37k today. Yesterday 40k. Another 7% drop. It peaked at 62.5k yesterday. Should drop below 60k later tonight at peak time.

Last night was server maintenance. But during the day it dropped 6% vs previous day. Now another 7%.

The lowest previous day bottomed at 22.5k. So less 6%, then another 7%, and today's low should be about 20k. Might break under at about 19k.
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Alright, I'll admit it.

I was wrong.
 
That content update they are doing in a few weeks will heavily skew the CCU. Looking at some of the Destiny updates, sometimes it swings the CCU wildly upwards as gamers jump back in.

Regardless, the daily trend is somewhere around a 5-10% attrition rate. Weekends help maintain any losses where last weekend the Friday float carried over to the weekend. Not even one full week has past, but the peak CCU is still launch day.

So it's a slow burn kind of game. It's not Highguard levels of gamer loss where it tanked 90% in a week and then had daily attrition of around 25% tanking it down to 300 gamers. Marathon's CCU loss is much more gradual.

If Marathon's peak today ends up at 60k, then it'll be a 32% loss vs 88k peak. Garbage like Highguard was insane how fast the CCU toileted.
 
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StreetsofBeige said:
That content update they are doing in a few weeks will heavily skew the CCU. Looking at some of the Destiny updates, sometimes it swings the CCU wildly upwards as gamers jump back in.

Regardless, the daily trend is somewhere around a 5-10% attrition rate. Weekends help maintain any losses where last weekend the Friday float carried over to the weekend. Not even one full week has past, but the peak CCU is still launch day.

So it's a slow burn kind of game. It's not Highguard levels of gamer loss where it tanked 90% in a week and then had daily attrition of around 25% tanking it down to 300 gamers. Marathon's CCU loss is much more gradual.

If Marathon's peak today ends up at 60k, then it'll be a 32% loss vs 88k peak. Garbage like Highguard was insane how fast the CCU toileted.
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At 40k currently, curious to see how this evening pans out
 
is there any prediction on when do we expect any formal announcement from Bungie/Sony either for good or bad? Missing either the classic "Players have shot more than X billions of bullets!" type of tweet or the "We hear your feedback, the warmth of your support has been incredible..." type of tweet
 
CentralScrutinizer said:
I think that's hard to say. It could just exist in the background for years with no marketing hype or chatter like a lot of F2P games. The small core audience likes it and the developers silently milk them while 99% of the market doesn't even know it exists anymore.

I think it comes down to how it's marketed in the future. Will it be like Fallout 76 / ESO where they try to yearly push it via a conference where most people tune out and forgot it was even a thing or will it be like the F2P / GAAS slop that you see ads for at Keighly's show, or will it just exist with no marketing?

I don't think the servers ever get shut down within a few years because its existence is too important to some people at Sony to fight tooth and nail to not admit it was a flop. I may just quietly live in the background while the fanbase tries to gaslight everyone into thinking it's a massive game.
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f if that's the case then why did they shut Concord down so fast
 
Guardian Monkey said:
Right, but I actually bought the game and have some interest in how it performs. While on the other hand, you all do not, yet are the majority posters here. So again I ask why are you here other than to cheer on a game's demise. You picking up that logic? 😂 😂 😂 probably not…
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You sure we don't have interest in how it performs? I assure you most Marathon haters are former Bungie fans and I'm here for their crash and burn as much as the game. And now that the usual suspects are using Marathon to shit on gamers as a whole with their "chuds" , "incels" and "right wing" and other stupidity because we don't like a video game, I'm even more invested in both failing.

Branded said:
LOL but the hate bandwagon DID beat the Concordian Timeline drum??? You were all expecting/hoping the game to crash and burn in the first two weeks and now it won't and now you have to analyze every single fluctuation in the CCU on one platform.

Shit's pathetic.
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The Concord thing is a fucking meme. No one legitimately thought Marathon would die like Concord in a week or two...lol. It's fucking Bungie, it was never going to die instantly. And, btw, that's the largest platform, which would mean analyzing the numbers on that make the most sense. But we can talk about how poor it's doing on consoles, too, if you'd like? And let's be honest, if the game was pulling 500k on Steam, you would be tossing those numbers in our faces daily as well to own the people in this thread, quit playing.

Branded said:
I'm not the one displaying desperate behavior btw.
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You don't think constantly defending a game in an OT where the people attacking it don't even exist and then ignoring and un-ignoring the CCU thread because you just can't help yourself is pathetic and desperate behavior? Because it's actually both pathetic and desperate.
 
Guardian Monkey said:
Right, but I actually bought the game and have some interest in how it performs. While on the other hand, you all do not, yet are the majority posters here. So again I ask why are you here other than to cheer on a game's demise. You picking up that logic? 😂 😂 😂 probably not…
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this
wo things 1 fans hate that games as a service is taking over the single player sector 2 Blue Point died for this kind of slop
 
Negotiator101 said:
Look what happened at EA just recently, the Battlefield team had big layoffs because the multiplayer wasn't bringing in the numbers and Marathons numbers are very similar now with it only being released 1 week ago 😬 to claim everything is going as planned it's crazy.
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Was there ever any reporting beyond "EA has laid off an unknown number of individuals from across its Battlefield teams, including workers at Criterion, Dice, Ripple Effect, and Motive Studios, IGN understands."?
 
Looks like CCU caught up.

The 1 pm adjusted. Looks like the 1 pm number I took at about 1:15 pm still adjusted on Steamdb. It adjusted from 37k to 40k.

I'm positive I did the comparison right, but it looks like today's 1 pm is +1% vs yesterday. At 2 pm (18:00 UST), still +1%.

Maybe Steamdb adjusts the hourly number on their graphs for a bit until it locks. So maybe dont use a past hourly number until an hour or so has passed.

If the trend holds, it should be similar to yesterday's peak of 62-63k.
 
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For Steamdb (I might be wrong), but I think what happens is when the chart updates for an hour (let's say 6 pm est as an example), that number wont be final until 7 pm or so passes. Then the site will adjust 6 pm hour with a final number.

If you look at the 6 pm number at 6:20 pm, that 6 pm number in the graph is not locked and loaded. It's there for now, but will do a final adjustment when 7 pm comes around.

I think that's how it works, but not sure. I thought once an hour passes, Steamdb immediately takes a snapshot to put in the graph, but maybe not.
 
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