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

Gamalytics revised their estimate down. Instead of 977k copes sold. It's now at 778k. I think Paul Tassi said Marathon was skewing a bit more to PC. So maybe consoles are 600k. In total, maybe the game has sold 1.4M-ish.

And it's not that their data link on Steam isnt updated. You can see the # of reviews, followers and playtime are up from the old data set.


Mar 14.....................................................................Mar 16

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Gamalytics revised their estimate down. Instead of 977k copes sold. It's now at 778k. I think Paul Tassi said Marathon was skewing a bit more to PC. So maybe consoles are 600k. In total, maybe the game has sold 1.4M-ish.

And it's not that their data link on Steam isnt updated. You can see the # of reviews, followers and playtime are up from the old data set.


Mar 14.....................................................................Mar 16

Bs31uug7eij5mSe6.jpg
TH2nAK4XUcih1Hds.jpg
It's not skewing PC , it's almost all PC. The console sales are atrocious and I've seen dozens and dozens of posts from people in regions other than the U.S. talking about not being able to turn off cross play with PC because their wait times are shit, or being constantly tossed in U.S. servers because of a lack of local players.

For all the hand wringing about discussing Steam CCU numbers, they're literally as good as it gets for this game. It's the 20th best seller on PS5, which means it dropped 4 places since Saturday. It's like 70+ on Xbox, it might as well not even exist on that platform.

Steam is the end all be all of this game and it's fate is solely tied to what it does on Steam at this point.
 
But for games, I think gamers expect any studio saying From the Makers of.... to have more people directly making the new game than the old ones because it's an industry where gamers and devs are a lot closer in interaction and name drops, compared to the avg junk food eater knowing absolutely nothing about Hershey's or anyone who works there.
Yeah, but imagine Bungie does well enough to still be around 20 years from today. That'll be over 30 years since Halo Reach and Destiny. Pretty much every one who worked on it would be retired by that point.

Are you saying at that point, no matter how successful they've been, they shouldn't be able to say "from the makers of Halo & Destiny"?
 
Gamalytics revised their estimate down. Instead of 977k copes sold. It's now at 778k. I think Paul Tassi said Marathon was skewing a bit more to PC. So maybe consoles are 600k. In total, maybe the game has sold 1.4M-ish.

And it's not that their data link on Steam isnt updated. You can see the # of reviews, followers and playtime are up from the old data set.


Mar 14.....................................................................Mar 16

Bs31uug7eij5mSe6.jpg
TH2nAK4XUcih1Hds.jpg
Im not sure how a game that peaked at 80k, is currently at 60k claims to have sold 1.4M copies when PC is the vast majority of players.

I would highly doubt it would even reach 500K copies sold on all platforms, let alone 1.4M.
 
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Yeah, but imagine Bungie does well enough to still be around 20 years from today. That'll be over 30 years since Halo Reach and Destiny. Pretty much every one who worked on it would be retired by that point.

Are you saying at that point, no matter how successful they've been, they shouldn't be able to say "from the makers of Halo & Destiny"?
I think they can say it if they want to, but it is kinda disingenuous.
For creative works we generally associate it with the people who made it. Like for movies or books they will often say "From the director/author of..." etc because that is what people care about.
It'd be like if Konami put out a new game saying "From the makers of Metal Gear Solid" even though Kojima isn't involved at all.
 
Im not sure how a game that peaked at 80k, is currently at 60k claims to have sold 1.4M copies when PC is the vast majority of players.

I would highly doubt it would even reach 500K copies sold on all platforms, let alone 1.4M.

Yeah it's kinda weird and contradictory to say it has strong retention of 'core players' but also must have sold 2 million copies to have that CCU. If the same 60k CCU is coming from the same pool of active players, I realy doubt we're looking at more than half a million on PC
 
I think they can say it if they want to, but it is kinda disingenuous.
For creative works we generally associate it with the people who made it. Like for movies or books they will often say "From the director/author of..." etc because that is what people care about.
It'd be like if Konami put out a new game saying "From the makers of Metal Gear Solid" even though Kojima isn't involved at all.
I completely understand where you, StreetsofBeige StreetsofBeige , and others are coming from. And if you're an enthusiast in a field, and you know the individuals who made the thing, then "from the makers of" or "from the directors of" really only matter if it's from specific people.

But for most people, they don't get that granular. They don't know the studio, let alone the directors. They know the product. It's a marketing tool more than anything. And those sometimes do border on disingenuous.
 
More important than this game possible failing .. is the steam vs consoles split .. if it is that high than is the sweet cherry on top of the shitcake Sony is swallowing for its gaas push on playstation.
 
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Meanwhile Division 2:

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I think it's a banger.

Division 2 is kind of enjoying their "No Man's Sky" moment, so to speak. They've continued to release content for a while now and each update has been fairly meaty for free content.

It's also dirt cheap and has a load of content for folks.

They had a fair priced expansion last year and I believe there will be another one sometime this year.
 
I didn't get it w/ battle royale either. a whole game made from call of duty's free for all mode? that used to be just one game mode among many. or for that matter a mod for a game.
BR is a whole mode made from... COD FFA? This might be the dumbest post in the entire thread.
It's pure cooperate efficiency to extract as much value as possible. The only reason why people fall for it is because developers clearly use proven psychological methods that activate the same addiction in gamblers.
Unless I missed something it doesn't sounds like Marathon uses particularly scummy monetization, but I could be wrong.

This is bullshit and you know it. Server costs are only high when they have to support millions of players on multiple matches. Its perfectly possible to host a home server for you and 5 friends, heck even all the way up to 100 players would work on a better machine.

There is no tecnical reason for it to be like this. It is a deliberate business decision because they know its harder to sell $20 dollar skins and battle passes when players have the power to host games their own way, not to mention its much harder to herd them towards newer slop when the old stuff works just fine.
Nah, this is bullshit.

Sure, locked down matchmaking/hosting helps enable battle passes and the like, but you completely ignore how we got here.

The ability for player hosted servers was pretty standard on PC and worked pretty okay alongside some official servers back when things like cloud scaling and huge CCUs weren't really a thing. Meanwhile in consoleville 'lobbies' and 'matchmaking' alongside people hosting matches on their consoles while playing them became kind of standard. Ya know, the whole "you only won because of host advantage!" and host migration when the host rage quit or just got too laggy. It was a bad user experience.

But you can't have 500k people online at the same time trying to play a game by refreshing a server list and mashing the connect button. You need matchmaking servers in front of them, that's an obvious technical reason for modern online game hosting.

User hosted dedicated servers also came with a whole modding culture, which sure I loved, but there are security considerations. Not to mention the fact if you give the server to the player along with the game... then like every PC game from over 20 years ago... you're gonna have a no-cd crack for the game client and a crack on the server to ignore the serial key checks and boom, you have the full multiplayer experience on your pirated game.

The thing that tied it all together before the Battle Pass stuff was really the COD4 style progression system. You don't control the servers, and player servers will serve up massive XP, instant unlocks, etc... I'm sure that's a major contributor to why MW2 went full matchmaking no dedicated servers... ya know... the funny .jpg? Steam group: Boycott Modern Warfare 2 (WE WANT DEDICATED SERVERS)?

It's not skewing PC , it's almost all PC. The console sales are atrocious and I've seen dozens and dozens of posts from people in regions other than the U.S. talking about not being able to turn off cross play with PC because their wait times are shit, or being constantly tossed in U.S. servers because of a lack of local players.

For all the hand wringing about discussing Steam CCU numbers, they're literally as good as it gets for this game. It's the 20th best seller on PS5, which means it dropped 4 places since Saturday. It's like 70+ on Xbox, it might as well not even exist on that platform.

Steam is the end all be all of this game and it's fate is solely tied to what it does on Steam at this point.
That's one of the things that make me think that maybe deep-down Marathon is actually a banger. That it scared off the traditional console Bungo crowd.
 
It's not skewing PC , it's almost all PC. The console sales are atrocious and I've seen dozens and dozens of posts from people in regions other than the U.S. talking about not being able to turn off cross play with PC because their wait times are shit, or being constantly tossed in U.S. servers because of a lack of local players.
I know extraction genre is a PC thing but because its a new genre we can't make hard facts.
Historically Bungie has been very strong on Consoles. I don't see why that would change with Marathon.
 
It's not skewing PC , it's almost all PC. The console sales are atrocious and I've seen dozens and dozens of posts from people in regions other than the U.S. talking about not being able to turn off cross play with PC because their wait times are shit, or being constantly tossed in U.S. servers because of a lack of local players.

For all the hand wringing about discussing Steam CCU numbers, they're literally as good as it gets for this game. It's the 20th best seller on PS5, which means it dropped 4 places since Saturday. It's like 70+ on Xbox, it might as well not even exist on that platform.

Steam is the end all be all of this game and it's fate is solely tied to what it does on Steam at this point.
More important than this game possible failing .. is the steam vs consoles split .. if it is that high than is the sweet cherry on top of the shitcake Sony is swallowing for its gaas push on playstation.
Where are we getting console numbers from?
 
Lol if they really think 66k or 72k is great 💀💀💀
That 66k was last tuesday aka 6days ago, now only at 62k durning sunday peak, probably last time it even breaks 60k ever :P

Now question is, will every1 at bungie agree to get their salaries getting cut at same %age marathon loses players from its 88k alltime peak? Aka 35-40% lower in april vs march(they are at -29% on 15th march, sunday, only gonna get worse from now), then again lower and lower each month so studio could live? Unlikely :messenger_smiling_hearts:
Time to call hermen "the hitman" hulst, ASAP:
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But you can't have 500k people online at the same time trying to play a game by refreshing a server list and mashing the connect button. You need matchmaking servers in front of them, that's an obvious technical reason for modern online game hosting.
Yes you can, by simply having both. Case in point, CS2 is like that (even has offline LAN).

User hosted dedicated servers also came with a whole modding culture, which sure I loved, but there are security considerations. Not to mention the fact if you give the server to the player along with the game... then like every PC game from over 20 years ago... you're gonna have a no-cd crack for the game client and a crack on the server to ignore the serial key checks and boom, you have the full multiplayer experience on your pirated game.
This is the business reason i gave, not a technical one. Much harder using FOMO to sell $20 dollar skins when you can have a custom one in a modded private server

The thing that tied it all together before the Battle Pass stuff was really the COD4 style progression system. You don't control the servers, and player servers will serve up massive XP, instant unlocks, etc... I'm sure that's a major contributor to why MW2 went full matchmaking no dedicated servers... ya know... the funny .jpg? Steam group: Boycott Modern Warfare 2 (WE WANT DEDICATED SERVERS)?
Again, entirely business decision. Custom player games mean no centralized progression, meaning no way to tether players to hooks, and thus stuff like selling XP boosts tied to battlepasses or virtual currencies to purchase items become much less appealing.
 
Where are we getting console numbers from?

Console numbers are derived from general user player bases on various sites coming from PSN. Sony themselves don't publish that data but you can pretty easily tell if something is hit or not just by virtue of having say 1000 linked PSN accounts on some general gaming site and then seeing how many of them are playing marathon vs other major games.

Steam has exact numbers.
 
More important than this game possible failing .. is the steam vs consoles split .. if it is that high than is the sweet cherry on top of the shitcake Sony is swallowing for its gaas push on playstation.
It's not so much the GaaS push if the games are actually appealing to a big audience, like that Naughty Dog Factions would of been. Instead we got Concord and now this, both had terrible art direction which severely hindered their success. How a game plays becomes irrelevant if there isn't that relatable connectiont with the consumer. Raiders for instance is not a massive success because of it's gameplay, it's because of it's look and the atmosphere it creates or immersion in the world and it's law IMO.
 
The hyper fixation on concurrent players numbers is really some of the lamest shit ever

How so? Back in the days there were plenty of MMO's trying to compete with WoW.

However good they might have been, why would you want to jump into a game that might shut down within months if noone else shows up?

As evidenced by dwindling player numbers in Marathon, this online only game has no lifeblood in it.

You're asking consumers to put down 40$ into a game that will not survive 6 months.
 
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Yes you can, by simply having both. Case in point, CS2 is like that (even has offline LAN).
The vast majority of games in CS2 are played via matchmaking, c'mon now. And we're talking CS, the game is essentially 25+ years old and didn't make it on console despite some mediocre attempts. So yeah it wasn't shaped by exactly the same forces I described. But okay, sure, in general many games could provide servers on top of matchmaking systems if they really wanted to. That doesn't make matchmaking systems inherently predatory.
This is the business reason i gave, not a technical one. Much harder using FOMO to sell $20 dollar skins when you can have a custom one in a modded private server


Again, entirely business decision. Custom player games mean no centralized progression, meaning no way to tether players to hooks, and thus stuff like selling XP boosts tied to battlepasses or virtual currencies to purchase items become much less appealing.
Ensuring the integrity of your gameplay systems is a technical issue. Even if it's for a system like muh COD-prestige-style grind which I'm totally over. And we're talking Marathon here... an extraction game doesn't make a whole lot of sense without everybody playing on the same servers and Bungo managing your stash on the backend. Not to mention the backend isn't just going to be the servers that host the individual matches, but also a non-trivial database for all the persistent loot and progression.

Of course, you ignored and failed to quote the whole section where I went over the timeline of how modern matchmaking systems came about. For a more concrete example, MW2 removed dedicated self-hosted servers on PC, there wasn't a hint of battle passes or virtual currencies for years. Arguably the first slightest whiff of that was 3 releases later with Black Ops 2 throwing in a DLC weapon along with one of the map packs. That was its own little controversy as you could queue against players on normal maps who didn't have the Peacekeeper. Ahh, simpler times. No XP boosts or battle passes. That's very obviously not why these games went with the matchmaking model.

I guess the original argument that I butted in on was something about GaaS being inherently anti-consumer and IMO it's whatever. If not enough people are still playing Marathon and it gets shut down, then it's not really worth playing. The only people that are going to care are the sort of people who have sleepless nights thinking about the episodes of Doctor Who that got taped over by the BBC or whatever. Bungo's 'content vault' Thanos-snapping the early Destiny 2 campaigns completely out of existence was more anti-consumer than anything that can happen with Marathon.
 
Ensuring the integrity of your gameplay systems is a technical issue.
You mean ensuring the integrity of your monetization systems. If a random group of friends want to play the game with infinite ammo machine guns and giant heads amongst themselves that should be their business.
Of course, you ignored and failed to quote the whole section where I went over the timeline of how modern matchmaking systems came about.
Because it doesnt matter. Maybe they had some genuine motivation to do it like that back then, it was 2009 and devs were still experimenting with MP. Not to mention it was before the entire mobilification of the market, and players weren't as much aware of how shitty things could get.

But nowadays? The motivations for doing things like this are perfectly clear.

I guess the original argument that I butted in on was something about GaaS being inherently anti-consumer and IMO it's whatever. If not enough people are still playing Marathon and it gets shut down, then it's not really worth playing. The only people that are going to care are the sort of people who have sleepless nights thinking about the episodes of Doctor Who that got taped over by the BBC or whatever.
Tell that to all the people clutching their pearls, swearing up and down marathon is amazing. Being niche or less popular isn't a good justification for something to completely cease existing.

Or to put it another way, you can only comfortably say something like this because it hasn't happened to a game you care about yet.

Bungo's 'content vault' Thanos-snapping the early Destiny 2 campaigns completely out of existence was more anti-consumer than anything that can happen with Marathon.
Why not? Its literally the same developer. They did it once, they can do something on that level again, if not worse.
 
The fuck?

How come that's jad a sudden up tick?

I think this covers most of it;

Division 2 is kind of enjoying their "No Man's Sky" moment, so to speak. They've continued to release content for a while now and each update has been fairly meaty for free content.

It's also dirt cheap and has a load of content for folks.

They had a fair priced expansion last year and I believe there will be another one sometime this year.
 
You mean ensuring the integrity of your monetization systems. If a random group of friends want to play the game with infinite ammo machine guns and giant heads amongst themselves that should be their business.

Because it doesnt matter. Maybe they had some genuine motivation to do it like that back then, it was 2009 and devs were still experimenting with MP. Not to mention it was before the entire mobilification of the market, and players weren't as much aware of how shitty things could get.

But nowadays? The motivations for doing things like this are perfectly clear.
I'll stand behind my comments and leave it at that.
Tell that to all the people clutching their pearls, swearing up and down marathon is amazing. Being niche or less popular isn't a good justification for something to completely cease existing.

Or to put it another way, you can only comfortably say something like this because it hasn't happened to a game you care about yet.
I've been playing online FPS since the original Doom on DWANGO. It's nice that you can still play a game of Doom against someone if you want to. But I've moved on... same goes for every game whose multiplayer scene has petered out. I think Titanfall 1 servers are still up, but there's essentially nobody playing so it doesn't matter to me if the servers are up or down. Not healthy to get autistic about it.
Why not? Its literally the same developer. They did it once, they can do something on that level again, if not worse.
They essentially nuked a bunch of single-player campaigns that people paid for because it was too annoying for them to do QA on along with later updates/changes. I get people being mad about that. That seems worse than anything they can do with Marathon all the way up to just shutting the game down at its natural death. What else can they do? Rotate some maps out of the game? No big deal, is what it is.
 
It's not so much the GaaS push if the games are actually appealing to a big audience, like that Naughty Dog Factions would of been. Instead we got Concord and now this, both had terrible art direction which severely hindered their success. How a game plays becomes irrelevant if there isn't that relatable connectiont with the consumer. Raiders for instance is not a massive success because of it's gameplay, it's because of it's look and the atmosphere it creates or immersion in the world and it's law IMO.

I grt your point and I dont completely disagree but...

Its a push the moment you divert your studios attentions and efforts to a single goal, almost sidelining what made you what you are today in the market and in the process fucks up your entire single player pipeline to the point of closing competent studios or making studios go a full gen without releasing a single game or maybe just one, because they were busy experimenting with their new objectives (gaas). It directly influenced studios purchases, projects greenlighting, budget and efforts allocations.

Sure a single good game like factions could have come out of the gaas shithole , or we could have had a great gen with multiple games from bluepoint, bend, naughty dog and so on. In the end we got none.

But thats kind of off-topic... so ill move on.
 
How so? Back in the days there were plenty of MMO's trying to compete with WoW.

However good they might have been, why would you want to jump into a game that might shut down within months if noone else shows up?

As evidenced by dwindling player numbers in Marathon, this online only game has no lifeblood in it.

You're asking consumers to put down 40$ into a game that will not survive 6 months.
"I'll take self fulfilling prophecy" for $800, Alex lmao
 
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