Bungie’s Marathon Is Only Doomed If Sony Wants It To Be

Two things have become clear since Marathon launched at the beginning of March. The first is that it’s a very cool game that feels unlike anything else out there. The second is that most players are perfectly happy having nothing to do with it. While Bungie’s extraction shooter garners fanatical hyper-fans who make time to log on whenever possible, the total number of sales looks like it may have fallen well short of what Sony hoped for and what the studio needs to avoid even more layoffs.

According to guesswork from data firm Alinea Analytics, at $40 Marathon has sold 1.2 million copies since launch across console and PC, with an estimated 70 percent of those copies sold on Steam compared to 19 percent on PlayStation 5 and just 11 percent on Xbox Series X/S. That’s fewer copies than the Demon’s Souls remake sold at $70, the studio behind which Sony closed last month. And a weak PS5 attach rate means only a fraction of total sales are happening on a platform where Sony gets to collect the full margin.

A more promising picture is painted by the player metrics. Marathon‘s player numbers don’t come anywhere close to those rival extraction shooter Arc Raiders pulled in with its explosive launch, but those who stick with the game become obsessed. “Despite the friction-heavy start, the data suggests that those who survived Marathon’s onboarding are loving life,” writes Alinea’s Rhys Elliot.

Marathon has sold 1.2M copies across Steam, PS5, and Xbox (@alineaanalytics estimates).

It hasn’t exactly made the splash Sony and Bungie wanted, even if the game underneath the surface is a MASTERWORK of design.

Looking at the split between Steam, PS5, and Xbox, Steam is… pic.twitter.com/vl8ku1Y1Bn

— Rhys Elliott (@superhys) March 24, 2026

He continued, “We’ve been tracking cross-platform [daily active users], and while there’s the expected post-launch leakage, many players are sticking with it. After peaking at 478K total DAUs on its first Saturday, Marathon has settled into a respectable rhythm, holding 345K DAUs as of yesterday and averaging 380K DAUs across the weekend.”

That’s in-sync with one data point shared last week by Circana’s Mat Piscatella. “According to Circana’s Player Engagement Tracker, on Tuesday the average Marathon player played for just shy of four hours on both PlayStation and Xbox, ranking among the top 10 games on both platforms,” he wrote.

Marathon is Sony’s biggest live service test yet

According to Elliot, total playtime has also been impressive. PC players have put an average of 27.8 total hours into Marathon, followed by 16.5 hours for PS5 users and 17.3 hours for Xbox users. An estimated 22 percent of Steam players have played over 50 hours, while 7 percent have played over 100 hours. Marathon is not live-service slop. While many have completely passed on its highly stylized art direction and brutal gameplay loop, the people who love it really love it.

As Elliot points out, that leaves Sony with a difficult choice to make: pull the plug or double down. We don’t know what Sony’s sales expectations were for the game or how much it cost to make, let alone the cost of continuing to operate at the scale Bungie is known for. What we do know is that the studio is located in one of the most expensive game development markets in the world, Microsoft once balked at acquiring Bungie over its “high burn rate,” and Sony has been on a cost-cutting spree these last few years.

It paid $3.6 billion for the studio at the height of Destiny 2‘s popularity and the pandemic-era-fueled gaming acquisition binge. Two years later, executives were calling the studio out by name during earnings calls for hurting profitability. The studio didn’t “necessarily understand how their respective efforts tie into overall growth, sustainable profit generation, and higher margins,” then-PlayStation-chairman Hiroki Totoki said in 2024. He instituted layoffs of 220 employees months later, with about 100 heads already having been cut in October of the previous year.

Destiny 2, meanwhile, is at its lowest concurrent player count ever on Steam. Once a cash cow, the game has had its newest expansion delayed and its future seems more in doubt than ever from a gameplay and content perspective. It’s hard to see how Marathon, in its current state, fills that void, let alone carries the rest of Bungie forward as it incubates its next round of projects in between managing existing live-service production pipelines. That math is not on Marathon‘s side.

But the creativity, world building, and gameplay is. There can no longer be any doubt that Marathon is something special, even if it’s not the first-party financial juggernaut Sony was betting on all those years ago. Marathon is an excellent game and a solid foundation for something greater. Is that a live-service game that continues slowly building up a larger dedicated audience for years to come, or an eventual springboard for a single-player sequel that some traditional shooter fans have been begging for since the game was first revealed?

So far in the live-service space, Sony has dealt with runaway successes and clear disasters. Helldivers 2 outperformed its wildest expectations and Concord collapsed so spectacularly, Sony wiped the game from existence in just a couple of weeks. With Marathon, there’s no easy call to make. Sony has to prove it’s willing to invest in something that’s good in the belief that eventually it will pay off, or risk kicking the legs out from under an incredible game at a time when it’s harder than ever to get people to care about new franchises, let alone multiplayer ones.

Live-service dreams have eaten the PS5 generation alive and Sony’s first-party machine has little to show for it. At a time when gaming hardware has become homogenized and big publishers are going multiplatform, Sony is reportedly all-in on the PlayStation ecosystem. What’s the point of a console with exclusives if you’re not willing to put it on the line for a game that deserves it? And Marathon definitely deserve it.