I'd like to point to a player count for a different Bungie game (I didn't add the caption):
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Nearly twenty years ago, with undoubtedly a smaller (granted, still huge) budget and fewer devs, on a single console, when the idea of online console gaming was still relatively fresh, Halo 3 regularly had hundreds of thousands of players on simultaneously, if not over a million. And a lot of that population persisted for years afterward, with a small group of diehards continuing to play long after most moved on. It's the kind of game Bungie used to be able to make, the kind that would set the whole gaming world on fire and have a lasting legacy that persists two decades later.
Does
Marathon need that many players to thrive as a game? Possibly not, I couldn't tell you what a healthy base would look like. But does
Bungie need more players to make their ridiculous investment pay off? Definitely, they would
kill to get even a fraction of what Halo 3 got on launch without even being a multiplatform title.