Bungie has been featured in the news a lot lately, and for good reason. All eyes are on one of gaming’s best-known developers as they focus all their efforts on Marathon, which is now entering its 2nd season of content. But currently, the numbers don’t look great.
The data comes from Alinea Analytics, so as always, the numbers may not be exact. With that said, when Alinea last reported that Marathon had sold 1.2 million copies by March 24, the numbers were backed up by Paul Tassi of The Verge. In short, their data has typically proven to be pretty damn close to reality.
Which is bad news for Marathon, because according to Rhyss Elliott of Alinea, the updated sales stat is “almost” 1.5 million copies sold. That means it’s shifted less than 300k copies throughout April and May.
Of the copies sold, 68% is apparently on Steam and just 19% on PS5. Xbox is at 13%. That tracks because Paul Tassi was previously told by sources that the console crowd “really do not care for this thing”.
These numbers don’t bode too well for a game that reportedly cost around $250 million to make, unless the people playing it are spending big on microtransactions.
However, there is some hope. Bungie has just launched season 2, titled Nightfall, and Marathon is free to play for the week. It seems to be helping a little. On Steam, the game has jumped from typically having a daily peak concurrent player count of about 11k people to 30-40k over the last few days.
Layoffs are expected to occur at Bungie sometime soon, and the studio apparently has no other projects in the works. I’m genuinely feeling worried for the team. I don’t think Sony will shut them down just yet or anything like that, but unless Marathon starts doing a lot better, Sony isn’t going to keep supporting 800+ Bungie employees.
WGB 