Bungie’s new extraction shooter Marathon has reportedly sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.2 million copies, which sounds impressive right up until you start looking at the numbers for more than five seconds. Bungie itself has not confirmed the figure, but multiple reports claim the estimate is fairly close to the real total.
If that sales number is accurate, and the base game costs $40 per copy, not including deluxe or premium editions that can run upwards of $200 (but don’t include the game), then the total revenue from sales alone would land somewhere around $40 million to $50m, maybe $55 million, give or take. On paper, to some, that sounds like a respectable launch. In practice, the math starts proving how awful this is, almost immediately.
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
First, it should be noted that the game likely cost upwards of $300m to produce and ship, which seems so far off into the distance that we just don’t see any possible way Marathon makes up for such massive net losses. And it does not, nor will it ever matter, how good Marathon may be, because players are just not going to come to the game in droves to make up $250m in sales required to break even (assuming these figures are accurate).
The next red flag is the active and concurrent player count. Active means how many have popped on the game vs concurrent which are online at the same time. Active numbers seem to be dropping significantly but players are popping on to at least try the game out for a bit. But the concurrent numbers paint a broader picture of how many are sticking around at peak hours. Some are saying active numbers are decent, but the concurrent numbers look abysmal.
A total of 1.2 million units sold sounds like a hit, except Marathon only peaked at 88,337 concurrent players on Steam. Yes, Steam is not the whole picture, and everyone always says that, but the same reports also claim that insiders at Bungie confirmed that Steam accounts for roughly 70% of the total player base, leaving 30% split between PS5 and Xbox, with PS5 at about 19% and Xbox at roughly 11%. If those percentages are accurate, then the console numbers at peak would have been about 23,977 players on PS5 and 13,882 on Xbox, which brings the grand total peak to roughly 126,196 concurrent players across all platforms.
According to Alinea Analytics, 800K units were sold on Steam, 217K on PS5, and 133K on Xbox. But those numbers, if they added up to $55m or even upwards of $60m (if we throw in merchandise and in-game microtransactions) likely won’t even cover development costs, let alone marketing and everything else that goes into pushing a new AAA game title out the door and into the hands of consumers.
Still, when you look at concurrent player count, that makes the 1.2 million sales estimate feel off, but it gets worse when you look at current activity. As of right now, Marathon is sitting at around 20,310 concurrent PC players in the morning hours (as of 9:00a PST), with a 24-hour peak of 42,091 on Steam, which is less than half of its all-time peak from less than three weeks ago. If Steam still represents about 70% of the player base, that would put the total concurrent population across all platforms at somewhere near 60,000 players total, (42,000 would be about 70% on PC, and the remaining 18,000 would be on consoles to make up the full 100%).
And this is where the numbers stop making sense entirely.
To be fair, we understand that different people live in different timezones all across the world, but at any given peak on Steam, let’s say 55K (which is generous), means that the total concurrent players, at its absolute highest point during any given day since launch, would be roughly 78K total players (if we are still using Steam as the 70% player-count baseline). 78K peak concurrent players, even on weekends, doesn’t really make sense in trying to share that 1.2m copies were sold worldwide.
And, we would think, if Bungie did hit 1 million units sold, wouldn’t that be worth sharing across social media? Which they have not done. So either 1.2m is not accurate, and that’s why Bungie isn’t saying anything, or it is accurate, and it is far too low for Bungie to celebrate publicly.
Let’s look at our armchair math a little deeper. Because we are still trying to make sense of these numbers.
If 1.2 million people bought and own the game, but only around 126,196 (88K PC + 38K on consoles) ever showed up at launch, at Marathon’s peak, that means nearly 95% of the player base was not playing even at the game’s most concurrent launch period. Of course, we don’t expect that the game sold that many copies at launch, it has been three weeks, after all. But in 20 days? Shouldn’t this number be higher to support these sales figures?
Using the more recent numbers makes it look even worse, though. If there are roughly 60,000 concurrent players total right now, and the ownership estimate is supposedly 1.2 million, that means well over a million people who bought the game are simply not playing it. By that math, you end up with the absurd-sounding conclusion that around 1.1 million players aren’t playing. And obviously doesn’t line up cleanly with the ownership estimate.
Let’s look at the math real quick:
- Peak Playercount: 126,196, give or take
- Steam Peak: 88,337 or 70% of players, making the total around 126,196 players at peak across all platforms.
- Current 24-hour peak on Steam: 42,091 (assumed to still be 70% of concurrent players).
- Concurrent total over the last 24 hours: 42,091 accounts for 70% on Steam, making 60,130 concurrent players across all platforms.
- Current Player Count: 60,130 concurrent players ÷ 1,200,000 units sold is roughly 5% playing at the same time.
- Players not currently playing: 1,200,000 − 60,130 = 1,139,870 or 95%
Yeesh. Spin it however you want, that is not good. Even considering that, sure, not every single player who owns the game is playing at the same time, if only 40K players are concurrent on Steam at peak times throughout the week and maybe 55K during the weekend, that is a lot of dissatisfied customers. You can double the peak player count, hell, TRIPLE it, and it is still not even 200K total concurrent players. There just is no way to make sense of concurrent players being that high if sources are saying Steam is the primary major platform, taking the lion’s share of concurrent players at 70%.
Now, to be clear, Bungie has not confirmed any of these figures in any official capacity. And they probably never will. But the reported numbers do not line up in a way that feels entirely believable. If Steam really accounts for 70% of the player base, and the game never even cracked 100K concurrent players on PC, then the idea that more than a million copies have been sold starts to sound impossible.
The only way the reports make sense is if we are supposed to believe that thousands of people are buying the game every day, trying it once, quitting immediately, and somehow keeping the concurrent player count stuck between 20K and 40K across all platforms. And at that point, the only explanation that sounds remotely plausible is a massive wave of refunds, because otherwise the drop-off is hard to explain.
Now, with all of that said, we have personally been very vocal about not supporting Marathon specifically because Bungie is behind it. The studio’s anti-consumer business practices and what many fans see as the long-term mistreatment of Destiny have been enough for me to decide that we are not buying another Bungie product.
If the current numbers really are this bad, then layoffs would not be surprising, and neither would the possibility that Bungie ends up folded deeper into Sony, with the studio name eventually dissolved and franchises like Destiny and Marathon split between other teams. That would be unfortunate for the people working there, but at the same time, it would also be the result of decisions Bungie made themselves. And if the name eventually fades into the background, there are going to be a lot of players who will not feel particularly sorry about it.
