Bungie recently launched its ambitious extraction shooter Marathon, but the game’s initial launch has been somewhat underwhelming, especially when considering the team’s pedigree for first-person multiplayer shooters.
Although the title initially launched to nearly 100K players on Steam and saw decent traction on social media, it has slowly lost this momentum over the last few weeks. In fact, the situation is quite dire on a platform like Xbox, where Marathon is nowhere to be found in the top 50 most-played games.
Looking at Xbox’s list of the current most popular games on the platform, Marathon is nowhere to be found at the top, with the likes of Fortnite, Call of Duty, and more taking up these spots. In fact, the extraction shooter isn’t even in the top 70 most popular games on the platform.
According to Xbox’s list, Marathon is the 77th most popular game on the platform at the time of writing. It sits beside less relevant games like Mortal Kombat 1 and Skate 3, which is far from an encouraging sign for such a recent release.
The performance on Xbox is significant since PlayStation is already dialing back its third-party efforts. If major releases like Marathon continue to disappoint on the platform, the gaming giant might choose to pass on Xbox ports altogether in the future.
Over on Steam, the situation is better, but Marathon is no longer as popular as it was at release. Currently, it has fallen out of the top 20 most-played Steam titles.
The silver lining here is that Bungie is set to release the Cryo Archive raid tomorrow for Marathon players. This new piece of content could lead to a burst in the game’s popularity.
Elsewhere, more reviews for Marathon have also started rolling out, so positive word of mouth could help create further buzz for the extraction shooter. As for whether this will improve the game’s popularity on Xbox specifically, this remains to be seen.
The current situation is certainly concerning, and Bungie will likely attempt to entice players into at least trying Marathon through free weekends and other offers.
