Bungie’s Marathon launched last Thursday, opening the floodgates on another new extraction shooter for fans to sink their teeth into.

It arrives at a tumultuous time for live-service shooters with Highguard announcing that its servers will be going offline just over a month after launch. It seems that if these ambitious games don’t bring in a massive audience from the get-go, publishers don’t see much point in keeping them going for long.

So, after a full weekend to allow Marathon to breathe, how is it fairing against its main competitor ARC Raiders? The results are in, and it’s not looking totally promising.

On its first day of release, Marathon achieved a peak player count of 88,337 on Steam. Just shy of 100,000 players, that’s 38% less than the total number of Steam players who logged in to play the free server slam.

Considering Marathon has a £34.99 entry fee, that’s not a bad conversion rate. It’s also a damn-sight healthier than Sony’s last live-service shooter experiment – Concord only managed 667 players on Steam at any one time.

However, compared to ARC Raiders, Marathon is lagging a decent way behind. While it was thought that Marathon might pull a few players away from ARC Raiders, Embark’s extraction shooter still pulled in over 200,000 players on March 5, 2026.

Since then, it’s only seen an increase in player numbers with roughly 235,000 players logging in at the same time on Sunday afternoon. So far, it doesn’t look like Marathon is taking the extraction shooter crown any time soon.

So, the question now remains whether the current volume of players is enough to keep Marathon going. We won’t know console numbers until Sony publishes sales data, but if the game’s subreddit page is anything to go by, it appears that the game is holding up fairly healthily.

One player who logged over 30 hours in the game since launch says they’re ‘excited for the future’. The post reads: “I think it’s a bit of a lukewarm launch, but if they work hard at it, I think they can turn this game into something really amazing.”

Other gamers remain concerned as to whether Sony will keep the game going if it can’t pump its numbers up higher.

“I just think people are scared because the games industry is in an extremely volatile state right now where it doesn’t feel like there are clear indicators as to whether a game has a future or not,” one post on Reddit reads.

“Marathon being an awesome game that has captured the hearts of its fan base not being “the next big thing” probably just frightens some people because we truly have no idea what the discussions behind closed doors are like and whether or not Sony is happy with the launch, or even what their expectations were.”

For now, it appears that Bungie is all-steam ahead on supporting Marathon with live service content. Season 1 is already underway with a second and third season scheduled for later in the year.

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