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Marathon releases to 87,000 players on Steam and 87% Positive Reviews (sponsored by coachmcguirk91)
ChorizoPicozo
Member
Flopathon - Watch Games Die in Real Time
Track live Steam player counts, predict flops, roast bad games with the community.
Arsic
Loves his juicy stink trail scent
Flopathon - Watch Games Die in Real Time
Track live Steam player counts, predict flops, roast bad games with the community.flopathon.vercel.app
Dr. Samuel Hayden
Member
>struggling to even hit 50k today
lmao
lmao
winjer
Gold Member
Flopathon - Watch Games Die in Real Time
Track live Steam player counts, predict flops, roast bad games with the community.
Now this is the kind of innovation I can get behind.
Darchaos
Member
Random thought but when I'm scrolling around and see the game I can't put into words how fucking bad I HATE the art direction like it's nails on a chalk board to just look at.
It's so fucking awful I just want to litrelly slap the fuck out of whoever designed this trash
Like the game aside who else just can't stand the look? There's not a single thing cool about this to me
Plague Doctor
Member
Taking the "haters are ruining this game" narrative seriously...
If a bunch of disparate, decentralized critics, trolls, and shit posters can really flop a AAA game by simply posting publically available data and making jokes, then that AAA game (with the luxury of hundreds of millions of dollars for development, marketing, and research) deserves to flop.
And if that's the case, does the "haters" have power or are they meaningless/don't reflect the consumer and should be ignored as the press and the defense squads say?
Which is it? I feel it changes by the day.
Nah... games fail (or flop, or underperform, or whatever) on their own.
The amount of "haters" coincides proportionately to the general reception of a game and its issues. Last time I checked, no one is really talking all that much about RE:Requiem haters....
If a bunch of disparate, decentralized critics, trolls, and shit posters can really flop a AAA game by simply posting publically available data and making jokes, then that AAA game (with the luxury of hundreds of millions of dollars for development, marketing, and research) deserves to flop.
And if that's the case, does the "haters" have power or are they meaningless/don't reflect the consumer and should be ignored as the press and the defense squads say?
Which is it? I feel it changes by the day.
Nah... games fail (or flop, or underperform, or whatever) on their own.
The amount of "haters" coincides proportionately to the general reception of a game and its issues. Last time I checked, no one is really talking all that much about RE:Requiem haters....
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PeteBull
Member
Yups no game ever flopped coz it had even 10s of milions of haters, only reason game flops is coz it doesnt have enough amount of supporters(be it 1-time buy like in case of singleplayer games or continuos supportes like in case of gaas genre).
Lets even assume in case of a game like concord that it has solid 200m of haters, if it had solid 10m of supporters(instead of 25k worldwide) it would be perfectly fine.
Bungie/sony themselfs set the prerequisites for marathon success or failure by deciding on its budget, obviously with huge AAA budget game only survives if it has huge sales/big ccu numbers, which marathon couldnt gather.
Would sony/bungie in some alternative universe make marathon 20m usd budget AA actual sideproject then those ccu numbers/sales its currently getting would be good enough, but on this earth it needed 10x more simply
Hollywood Hitman
Gold Member
It's just their fragility is what it comes down to, it's literally the same as the left that claim words are violence.
People attach themselves SO HARD to a thing whether it's gaming or movies or shows and if you dislike it they absolutely take it as you're basically shitting on them in their whole entirety of life.
And they can't stand to even hear it. Which I get it sucks to hear people not agree on things or ideas or whatever, but an adult can just shrug it off and move on.
I will go to bat for a game but when it's apparent I'm not changing anyone's mind I can just let it go and if they shit all over it, ah well it's what it is.
Nydius
Member
This post reminds me of a relevant, if somewhat annoying, Instagram reel I saw a few days ago.
Plague Doctor
Member
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Dr. Samuel Hayden
Member
MMaRsu
Member
Steady decline every day = alive and well!
ChorizoPicozo
Member
Hollywood Hitman
Gold Member
The Mad Draklor
Member
RafterXL
Member
It's alive but it sure as hell isn't "well" so go convince yourself it's doing great in the mirror because that shit doesn't work to people who see it losing 35% of it's players in a week, and it started low. And it's #73 on Xbox as well as being #15 as a first party Sony title on PS5, which is hilarious because all initial talk was that PS would be it's biggest platform, but no, the pathetic Steam numbers are as good as it gets for Marathon.
Hollywood Hitman
Gold Member
I think they're fucked, I don't see a d3 until 2029 or so and I don't know if they can hold out that long but maybe they will pull it off no clue. But shame on them for not having d3 closer and ready to roll
Arsic
Loves his juicy stink trail scent
StreetsofBeige
Member
The 10 pm hour isnt over, but currently at 57k. Which is the same as 9 pm. Right around now this hour is when it tops out, so 57k should be the peak. No chance it'll hit 60k like yesterday. So it'll be about -5% vs yesterday.
Last night it bottomed out at 21k. So should hit 20k tonight.
Last night it bottomed out at 21k. So should hit 20k tonight.
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StreetsofBeige
Member
Darn. That link doesnt work for me.Flopathon - Watch Games Die in Real Time
Track live Steam player counts, predict flops, roast bad games with the community.
ChorizoPicozo
Member
The site is down I think
falconhoof
Member
Flopathon flopped. Site died. Faster than Concord.
LyricalShrike
Member
You can't tell what percentage of the player base has been lost from CCU alone. Players don't play every day at the same time for the same duration.
MMaRsu
Member
You can if every day at 20.00 there are less players than the day before
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Guilty_AI
Member
i'd say it's a two digit chance, game has been on a downward spiral ever since release. This next weekend will probably tell us more about the level of retention.
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LyricalShrike
Member
Consider seven people who play during the same two hour window. They all play together at launch to enjoy the hype of release then revert back to their usual schedule of playing one day per week in perpetuity. None of them happen to normally play on the same day of the week. You would look at the daily CCU and say "the player base dropped 6 players" when the player base actually remained the same.
CCU doesn't give you enough information alone to estimate changes to a player base. You have to develop a model and build up an estimate of total monthly users to try an approximate a player base.
StreetsofBeige
Member
The attrition rate is now at about 5-7% lately after a couple big chops down earlier. Weekends should hold it up and there's the content update later this month that should help retain gamers.
The game peaked at 88k a week ago on launch day. The weekday peak is at 57k.
By month end, I'll take a stab the peak CCU is about 30-35k.
StreetsofBeige
Member
Untrue.
Trending down every day (aside from holding on the weekend) means fewer players are playing. The weekdays have narrow peaks with decreasing peak CCU meaning it's not like the weekend where there's fat wedges as the gamer base playing is more spread out during the day as people might play at any hour.
Similarly a game that is amping up with a growing CCU doesnt mean it has bad CCU.
A monthly user base is pointless. Highguard lasted a full month. It started at 97k and ended its run with a couple hundred here or there. The CCU playing at the end is a couple hundred PC gamers, not some kind of magical average including the 97k launch would be about 3,000/day since launch.
LyricalShrike
Member
What I wrote is true. Your insistence that I'm wrong when provided with a counterexample which disproves the theory that you can tell how much a player base has dropped from CCU alone shows your misunderstanding of the concept of incomplete data.
The relatively stable curve for the game after a week would imply that player base is either stable or growing since people leaving the game would lead to sharper drop offs. That's why owner estimates keep going up on the steamdb page. Neither scenario can be conclusively decided for the same reason you can't say a game has lost "x%" of its player base purely by comparing daily peaks.
It's not a success for Bungie but the numbers would represent a promising start had the game been developed by a smaller studio.
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StreetsofBeige
Member
Owners doesnt mean CCU. Of course owner count goes up over time for any game. How can it go down? I'm going to assume you are trying to play a fast one with stats because nobody would believe that correlates. lol
It's not a relatively stable curve. It's down over 30% in a week. Peaked at 88k last Thursday. And yesterday's peak was 60k giving it a full weak of data. -32%. Add in today's peak of 57k, and that's another 3% making it -35%.
If you cant handle the drop, then probably better to put this thread back on ignore if you cant handle it. I cant believe a forum member would be so mad, they'd ignore a CCU thread.
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LyricalShrike
Member
Do you understand why average CCU can drop 30% while also increasing its player base and copies sold? Do you understand why a game with a consistent CCU of 700 could theoretically be be backed by a community of up to a million players? I'm not disputing a 30% drop in CCU. I'm disputing that can use that drop to say that the game lost 30% of its player base which was what the first person I quoted wrote. I understand why you didn't understand my simple example since you missed that context.
Coconutt
Member
StreetsofBeige
Member
And that tiny 700 CCU across millions of gamers means nobody cares about playing it. It's dead.
LyricalShrike
Member
It means up to one million people are playing it monthly if the CCU is consistently 700 and the average play session is 30 minutes. Its an obvious extreme distribution but its why games with 2k-4k CCU and stable monetization are able to support small studios in perpetuity. I'm kind of surprised that you can have any opinion based on CCU but not understand the really basic examples i'm giving you.
StreetsofBeige
Member
COD Black Ops 3 is the best selling COD game at 40M units. Doesnt mean all 40M still play it per month all spread out like you are trying to paint the picture.
If your example is an extreme situation why bring it up? If your example can stretch 700 CCU into a million monthly gamers, then how many gamers are there that have 100k CCU or CS2 that has 1M? Nobody ever said 700 CCU means only 700 people play that day. It just means it's a very small number at that point of time.
The reason why games with small CCU can survive is because they are small studios with low costs. Bungie isnt one of those. They already gutted the studio twice in layoffs years back despite making Destiny money and Pete Parsons said they were in the red.
I get it. As per your post in the other Marathon thread, you are mad gaf has a CCU thread about it. It's ok you dont like the game is down 30%. If it was a better game, the CCU would be going up like many others did. But it started tanking the next day. That's how it is.
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Hollywood Hitman
Gold Member
That doesn't work because that would mean that for 30 days, it coincidentally only 700 people out of a million are logged in taking turns. There's no way if there was a million people that a few days you wouldn't see 400k, 50k, 603k 19k etc at times a fluctuation that showed life of the game.
The chances of what you're suggesting is so low it's mathematically impossible that if it showed a daily average of 700, that it's a million different buyers just magically averaging off at 700 players CCU. And this isn't a small studio so it's already invalid.
That's so dumb I actually think I need chemotherapy or something to burn off the retardation after reading a fucking stretch like that.
LyricalShrike
Member
Nope but you couldn't tell the current active player base of that game from CCU either. You would need to develop a model derived from average CCU over time that makes assumptions based on other relevant data. A lazy model is to 10x average CCU if a game is reasonably popular globally and 20x if its a game where its player base is weighted into one or two regions. For marathon's average CCU the lazy math would be an active player base of 500,000 to 1,000,000 on PC alone which aligns with the 700,000-900,000 ownership estimates floating around. My actual answer is that its too early to make any determination since there are only seven days or so of data. Hence why I'm waiting to see where the game goes before making a purchase.
I'm not mad that this thread exists. I am impressed that people like you are trying to make statements about the game's player base while being so ignorant of basic concepts. I don't care what happens to marathon, I just want to equip you with the tools you need to be a better forum warrior.
StreetsofBeige
Member
So a game has a 10x or 20x multiplier to estimate sales. Maybe that's true. I've heard 10x before too. Who knows how true that even is.
So how would that math relate to a game with 700 CCU extrapolating to 1M monthly active users then? Using 700 CCU at 10 or 20x you get 7,000 or 14,000 sales.
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falconhoof
Member
Game lacks 8 year old anime girls who are actually way older for legal reasons.
duck_sauce
Member
That may be true, but it doesnt not make it slop.
As i said, the word has lost all meaning on GAF
StreetsofBeige
Member
Extraction shooters dont seem to do well there. ARC and Marathon skew heavy to US/Europe, while Asian evening time zones tank. The CCU at those times are a fraction.
But then some shooters skew heavy in Asia. CS2, PUBG, Apex, Delta Force all have sky high CCU in Asian evening hours.
I googled it. AI comes with this answer (whether anyone wants to believe it or not). Extractions shooters do worse in Asian countries because they prefer faster paced shooters that are F2P.
Might make sense. The 4 games I listed that do great in Asian are all F2P. While Arc and Marathon are slower paced games that costs money.
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LyricalShrike
Member
The point is to highlight why you can't derive player base from CCU alone. The other extreme is a constant CCU of one. It could theoretically be a player base on a single guy playing 24x7 but in practice it has to be more. You can model how many more by adding additional assumptions like estimating session time. Being able to model phenomenon is a valuable skill to learn.
Its just an edge case to highlight why using CCU alone to estimate playerbase is flawed. There are 48 slots of 30 minutes each in a day. It would require around 30,000 unique people to fill each of those slots without overlap or around 1,000,000 unique people to fill each of the 30 minute slots in a month. If all of those players played at the same time at launch before distributing themselves into their preferred slot and you only looked at CCU the response would be "The game lost 99% of its player base" even though it has a retention rate of 100%. Its obviously an unrealistic example but it explains why people like me think the launch numbers are fine purely based on the numbers.
We actually agree on other points. The launch would be a strong showing if Marathon were developed by a smaller studio. The game is clearly resonating with a decent enough group of gamers that it could be spun into a profitable and sustainable business. Unfortunately, its developed by a AAA studio owned by a large platform holder who has declared a push for increased margins across the business. Sony may pull the plug early rather than throwing more money to support something that may already be running at a loss. I'd be willing to look past Marathon's questionable UI to learn its complex systems if I weren't worried about Sony killing the project in 6 months to a year.