A little over a month after launching, Marathon remains a hot topic with fans as they debate whether it’ll wind up being a failure or a success. And now, we have a little more data as a new report gives us insight into how expensive the game was to make.

According to Paul Tassi of Forbes, the game’s official budget was at least $200 million, although “Likely more than $250 million”. That’s not including ongoing costs to keep new content coming out and the lights on.

Admiteddly, this is hardly surprising news. Just the other week, we had a report that the triple-A space was entering $300m budget territory as standard, and we’ve known that budgets have been skyrocketing for years now as development times rise and teams get larger. But it’s still nice to get some confirmation.

While we don’t have official sales numbers, Alinea Analytics claimed Marathon sold 1.2m by March 24, a stat that Paul Tassi says his source’s have verified. If we assume that all those copies were just the standard edition, that’s $47,988,000 in revenue. A large chunk of that would also go to Steam since that’s where the majority of the copies have been sold. In other words, the game is probably quite far from recouping its costs.

Of course, microtransactions complicate that math. We don’t know if people are spending money in-game. It could be a case where the game gets a small but dedicated audience who consistently buy things.

Tassi claims that his data says that, as of two weeks ago, Marathon was hitting around 345K players daily. That number has likely dropped at least a little.

Really, those are solid numbers that most games would be proud of. But Marathon is not most games. It has higher expectations as both a Sony and a Bungie title.

But it doesn’t seem like there’s any plans to abandon the game. In a recent post, Bungie said: “While we are very proud of what we have accomplished with the overall look and feel of the game since Alpha, we are in it for the long haul with Marathon. We look forward to many years of steady improvements to every aspect of the game. Thank you for taking this journey with us!”

One thing is for sure, though: Sony’s purchase of Bungie hasn’t really worked out like they probably imagined.