Thursday, March 26th 2026
Marathon Sales Estimated at 1.2 Million—Steam Leads the Pack With Two Thirds of Sales
Marathon launched almost exactly three weeks ago, with a mix of both fanfare and criticism, but given its reasonably strong player counts—with a stable 28,000-40,000 daily concurrent players—it's not surprising to learn that the game has sold an estimated 1.2 million units across the three platforms where it is available. According to Alinea Analytics, Marathon has earned $55 million in revenue across PC, PlayStation, and Xbox platforms. The analytics firm estimates that Steam holds around 800,000 of those players, while Marathon sold 217,000 units on PlayStation 5 and 133,000 on Xbox Series platforms.
The researchers also looked into the correlation between Bungie's previous games and Marathon, and it seems as though the developer's reputation may have been a substantial driving force for Marathon players. As many as 78.2% of Marathon's Steam players had previously played Destiny 2, while 62.7% had played Helldivers 2, and 55.9% played Arc Raiders—although it should be noted that all three titles had colossal player counts, so some of this may be pure coincidence, and some of it could also be attributed to Steam's recommendation algorithms, which would be more likely to show Marathon to fans of similar Bungie games. There have also been rumors of Marathon potentially launching on last-gen Xbox and PlayStation consoles, but nothing has been confirmed regarding that release just yet.
Sources:
Alinea Analytics, SteamDB
The researchers also looked into the correlation between Bungie's previous games and Marathon, and it seems as though the developer's reputation may have been a substantial driving force for Marathon players. As many as 78.2% of Marathon's Steam players had previously played Destiny 2, while 62.7% had played Helldivers 2, and 55.9% played Arc Raiders—although it should be noted that all three titles had colossal player counts, so some of this may be pure coincidence, and some of it could also be attributed to Steam's recommendation algorithms, which would be more likely to show Marathon to fans of similar Bungie games. There have also been rumors of Marathon potentially launching on last-gen Xbox and PlayStation consoles, but nothing has been confirmed regarding that release just yet.
29 Comments on Marathon Sales Estimated at 1.2 Million—Steam Leads the Pack With Two Thirds of Sales
Glazing aside, it's a decent game. Aside from the whole Art Raiders scandal, I don't really have an issue with it.
This is why people were saying they had to sell 7-11 million copies just to break even. Personally I see major layoffs coming Bungie's way later this year.
Likely it will survive longer than other concordian timeline releases, but not more than it's first year. Not with abysmal player counts like these.
So if you divide that by 10, you'd get 1.5 million copies sold and 46,500 peak player count. Marathon's attachment seems about on point with Ark, if not arguably better as Marathon's peak was over 90k upon release, so its peak was closer in relation to its total sales, just on a smaller overall scale.
A Concord, it is not. A success? Also no, not unless sales start picking up in a serious manner. If Bungie had maybe 100 people this would be a success, but at 1,000+ they cant cover their own bills for long at this rate.We can make an educated guess. Bungie had 1,600 employees in mid 2023. Rocket reach claims a current count of 1,239, and Tracxn claims 1238. but in 2024 they laid off down to 850 total.
So lets be charitable, and say they had an average of ~1000 employees per year. Marathon began active development in 2022. So 4 years of dev time. Accourding to payscale.com, the average base pay at bungie is $85k per year. So we'll be charitable again, and ignore any bonuses or additional pay of any kind.
1000 employees at $85k per year is $85 MILLION a year in salaries. That's $340,000,000 spent just in salaries during Marathon's dev time. This does not include: Rent for their corporate headquarters or any of their offices, healthcare or other benefits, licenses for any of the software they use, operational costs not directly related to wages, their lawsuits, utility bills, and so on and so forth.
Now of course we also have to acknowledge that they were also working on Destiny 2 at this time, releasing a new expansion pack every year, so they were not exclusive on Marathon. Even then, if you take just a third of their workforce over that whole 4 year span, that is still $113 million just on salaries.
Conservatively, the game cost about $120 million in total to make. That's before we factor in that Sony paid $3.6 BILLION to buy these guys, and Destiny 2 had been bleeding players since before their acquisition. Safe to say, unless Sony 's expectations were underground, this game isnt performing like they hoped. Even if every single player who bought that game also bought $20 worth of microtransactions on average, that still would only add up to about half of a very conservative budget estimate, before taxes and fees of course.
Id hazard a guess that current players arent NEW new players that are maybe playing their first Bungie game but old/die hard fans of bungie and carry overs from the Destiny franchise who decided to check the new game out.
It's not a failure on the level of Concord or Highguard, but I don't think it's exactly a success either. Either Bungie and Sony cut the price or make it F2P at the expense of the early adopters in the hopes of trying to bring in a larger crowd, or they'll shut it down for failing to meet critical metrics in another month or so.
It also proves how irrelevant the online commentary world largely is, because if you took the web's opinions at face value, this game was totally DOA.
The total cost to build the game also marketing budget puts them roughly $340–$430 million in the hole. According to online estimates.
If all of these 2.1million customers paid $40 for the game then that would equate to a little under $7million. So you're already deep in a financial grave before you even consider running costs.
Even if you factor in mtx (because that's what bungie do these days...) you are still in the grave.
A reminder that Bluepoint Games that made/worked on some of the most excellent PS games that sold extremely well got taken behind the shed and put down like old yeller so Bungie could continue to lose Sony BILLIONS.
I don't understand how you can spin those numbers as a positive thing for the game and the studio itself when it's clearly not and many more jobs will be lost because of it. Just not from the executive suite.
::EDIT::$55million is still baaaaaaaaaaaad
I think and tbf, hope, that Bungie won't survive this release. They're past expiry date since Destiny 1 and have been lying to us since, draining wallets with underhand MTX/DLC tactics, one overpriced or poor release after another. A sane marketplace (customer base) would have nuked this into the ground years ago.
Now if we're just talking MMOs, Destiny 1 had a surge of players even 1 month in at original release; maxing out at over 6.3 million total sales and maintaining well over 100k players across consoles, according to the Bungie vs O'Donnell lawsuit figures. Destiny 2 was stated to have moved even more product than Destiny 1 within 1 month of its release, and maintained over 150k players within said month.
In comparison, Marathon barely sold 1M according to the estimates, barely broke 88k on PC alone, and even less on consoles. It lost over half its player base less than a month in. 40k retention a month in would be great for an indie or small studio, but not for one as large as Bungie and for the costs spent to develop and maintain it.
While not quite a failure on the level of Highguard or Concord, it's not the success Sony and Bungie were hoping for (and needed; esp. given Bungie's continued existence relies entirely on it). Again, the only way to salvage it is to either make it F2P, or cut the cost of buy-in and hope MTX and the gameplay loop will attract enough players to keep spending. The problem is, the market already shows that it's not interested in what Marathon's selling over the existing competition. Otherwise, we'd have seen the numbers stabilize for much longer before the inevitable drop-off until season reset.
This thing is DOA, heck, if it ever truly lived to begin with.