Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

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Interesting thing about Marat-hon's sales is that they willingly cut away 2 group of players: Linux and Russian-speaking players. Linux players are like ~3% of players, but among English speaking players (which is main audience of Bungie games) are closer to 6-7%. Decent share of Linux players are Steam Deck users, so people who very likely spent 500$ on top of having PC and very likely to spend money inside of the game since they proved that they have money. Troons like to use Archlinuxbtw and game's aesthetics are closer to troons rather than normal people.

Russian-speaking audience is relevant since Tarkov (which is OG extraction shooter everyone try to copy) is Russian-made game and initial audience was like 99% Russian-speaking. Imagine making new Starcraft and banning Koreans, for example. CIS region might be not most lucrative region but it is big enough to boost peak online numbers and I am pretty sure that they would hit 100k peak on the release. At least Destiny 2 had decent amount of Russian-speaking players judging by LFG discord population.

By no means Marathon could've hit 500k players without banning players, but it just shows how retarded Bungie to cut players in the hardest time for them.
 
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Even though i like a lot of things about it, there's been something nagging me about the art design of this game ever since I saw it that really pisses me off, and this post made me realize what it was. it's semiotics. They put all of this effort into creating an aesthetic but they didn't create a design language. There's a how and a what but no why
 
big pauper said:
View attachment 8764980

Even though i like a lot of things about it, there's been something nagging me about the art design of this game ever since I saw it that really pisses me off, and this post made me realize what it was. it's semiotics. They put all of this effort into creating an aesthetic but they didn't create a design language. There's a how and a what but no why
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Explains why cosmetics are complete ass. Like the rewards are a literal QR sticker to put on your gun that's already covered in random font text and just gets lost in the noise
 
evilsponge said:
Explains why cosmetics are complete ass.
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I believe they (and the gaming industry in general) have "planned obsolescence" for cosmetics although there might be better term for it. Early cosmetics should be bad so in one or two years (which very likely would not happen) they can start releasing cool ones and in ~5 years to start releasing Fornite crossover skins. Maybe it happened in older games naturally, but I am pretty sure that nowadays they are actually planning it.

Also it might be a reason for such artstyle in the game. If the game had the old Marathon's aesthetics which was very cool and brutal (I recommend to check Bungie's gallery here), then it would be hard to justify having silly and immersion-breaking cosmetics which are typically more interesting to buy for average players.
 
Vhailor said:
Interesting thing about Marat-hon's sales is that they willingly cut away 2 group of players: Linux and Russian-speaking players. Linux players are like ~3% of players, but among English speaking players (which is main audience of Bungie games) are closer to 6-7%. Decent share of Linux players are Steam Deck users, so people who very likely spent 500$ on top of having PC and very likely to spend money inside of the game since they proved that they have money. Troons like to use Archlinuxbtw and game's aesthetics are closer to troons rather than normal people.

Russian-speaking audience is relevant since Tarkov (which is OG extraction shooter everyone try to copy) is Russian-made game and initial audience was like 99% Russian-speaking. Imagine making new Starcraft and banning Koreans, for example. CIS region might be not most lucrative region but it is big enough to boost peak online numbers and I am pretty sure that they would hit 100k peak on the release. At least Destiny 2 had decent amount of Russian-speaking players judging by LFG discord population.

By no means Marathon could've hit 500k players without banning players, but it just shows how retarded Bungie to cut players in the hardest time for them.
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A lot of Russian gamers switched their Steam accounts to Kazakhstan by now and thus have access to games like Marathon. I don't think it would've made much difference.
 
big pauper said:
View attachment 8764980

Even though i like a lot of things about it, there's been something nagging me about the art design of this game ever since I saw it that really pisses me off, and this post made me realize what it was. it's semiotics. They put all of this effort into creating an aesthetic but they didn't create a design language. There's a how and a what but no why
Click to expand...
Hah. Imagine Bungo putting in the effort of the group that made the OG Alien. Lots of cool things that exist in media are usually due to the work of a singularly dedicated autist on the team going above and beyond, but that sort of initiative nowadays is smothered in the crib by corporate nanny gagging.

(A more recent example in games is how the entire Dragon language in FFXIV was the work of one bored artist, who went ahead and invented near-single handedly the conlang of dragon grrs and growls that the game would eventually use throughout.)
 
Astro Galactic Megalul said:
A lot of Russian gamers switched their Steam accounts to Kazakhstan by now and thus have access to games like Marathon. I don't think it would've made much difference.
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I believe it is blocked in Kazakhstan as well. You got an netcode error if you are trying to log-in from Russian or CIS IP addresses - at least how it was in 2025. Anyways I don't think average Ivan really would change region, pay thrice as much money for the game and use VPN just to play Marathon when all his friends are playing Tarkov, Dota 2 or CS2.
 
Vhailor said:
Also it might be a reason for such artstyle in the game. If the game had the old Marathon's aesthetics which was very cool and brutal (I recommend to check Bungie's gallery here), then it would be hard to justify having silly and immersion-breaking cosmetics which are typically more interesting to buy for average players.
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Could have had longcoats, what a shame.
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Leaf Wage Slave Jr said:
I’m convinced most modern game development is just money laundering via “consultants” at this point.
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The rot is coming from inside the building, the c-suites are stuffed with MBAs who are in the business of doing business and know nothing about their actual industry, so they just try to copy someone else's work.
 
Good thing they asked everyone delay their reviews, didn't wanna miss out on that big fucking Cryo weekend population bump!
 
Looking Grim.
A week ago at 15:00 GMT 51k
This week at 15:00 GMT? 33k
almost a 20k drop.

Now the high was 53k and the high so far is 43k so not AS bad, but still grim.
I think we'll see 38k high next week
Then a more significant drop. Maybe even hitting the high 20ks
The lows under 10k easy.

I really want to know what they did for their servers.
From what I have found, they do, do some proprietary server work.
So it may not be AWS.
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Perhaps a saving grace. Someone at Bungie since Destiny 1 had the competency to set up custom servers.
 
TrainWreckWatcher said:
I really want to know what they did for their servers.
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I've heard that Bungie uses 60 Hz tickrate servers which are quite good for the genre. Most extraction looters and battle royales have lower, CS:GO had 60, which to be fair always was viewed as a flaw (Faceit and tournament servers had 120 Hz), but for Marathon to have servers as decent as a competitive game is quite good.

Dedicated servers are actually one of the reasons why Destiny players hated Marathon because they has been asking for dedicated servers for years. I remember how heated they were when one of the first information about Marathon was that it would get dedicated servers.
 
TrainWreckWatcher said:
Looking Grim.
A week ago at 15:00 GMT 51k
This week at 15:00 GMT? 33k
almost a 20k drop.

Now the high was 53k and the high so far is 43k so not AS bad, but still grim.
I think we'll see 38k high next week
Then a more significant drop. Maybe even hitting the high 20ks
The lows under 10k easy.
Click to expand...
I don't know where you got those first two numbers from, but they're very wrong. Actually, I'm not sure where you got any of your numbers from.

Saturday the 21st, 15:00 GMT/UTC was 38k
Saturday the 28th, 15:00 UTC was past 28k and only happened after your post.
That's 10k or slightly less, not 20k.

I think you compared the high of sunday to the high of saturday when comparing peaks, where sunday the 22nd was 53569 and saturday the 28th was 43927. Most people'd round those to at least 53.5k and 44k, so only a 9.5k difference (when you do an ACTUAL week-on-week, though, you find saturday the 21st had a peak of 56,683, meaning that the true week-on-week is more like 12.5k).

Note that steam charts at any given moment includes the current day's data and the 7 last complete previous day's data, but the default scope is actually the last 144 hours, so you need to expand it a bit to do true Week on Week comparisons.
 
Disc said:
Note that steam charts at any given moment includes the current day's data and the 7 last complete previous day's data, but the default scope is actually the last 144 hours, so you need to expand it a bit to do true Week on Week comparisons.
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This is the important thing to note, you need to pull the window back and expand slightly to get the full week.
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I think they might actually just distill the base down to the diehard/lifers, game will become unplayable outside of NA prime time (expected tbh) and then the remaining international players will bail due to degraded performance in their prime time. Eventually I think the remaining playerbase, as 'hardcore' as they are, will not be enough to buy enough recolored skins and the game will go on maintenance mode.
 
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