Marathon’s Player Count CCU estimates revealed – and its nowhere near as dead as you think

Marathon has had quite the heat against it over the last few weeks since its early March launch. The game has obviously not blown up as massively as people hoped it would, considering its like-for-like marketing and pricing strategy going against ARC Raiders. Yet, Marathon has carved itself a nice little niche in the market, and that is reflected in somewhat stable CCU, at least looking at recent data analytics firm Alinea Analytics.

The report goes into detail on a lot of points, ranging from market share on the platform, player count estimations via CCUs and more. And, according to Forbes’ Paul Tassi, it’s more or less in line with Bungie’s own data points.

Marathon’s hardcore player base really likes the game

What’s interesting here is that Marathon is actually relatively stable in its hardcore PvP audience. While players have fallen off, it’s still retaining strong engagement figures for the players who do stick around. After peaking at 478K total DAUs on its first Saturday, Marathon has settled into a respectable rhythm, holding 345K DAUs as of the report’s publication and averaging 380K DAUs across the weekend. The analytics report goes on to state that most of the players have either played long-term Destiny titles or at least dabbled with Master Chief Collection or Halo Infinite. It goes to show it’s marketed by Bungie for Bungie players, even if it’s an awkward, hard-to-learn, and somewhat clunky extraction shooter in those early key onboarding sessions.

Here at The Escapist, we have also gotten a premium account for our own statistical investigations in recent months for PlayTracker, another analytics tool. Its data also reports similar figures to Alinea Analytics of its rough 1.2 million sales. It also estimates that at least 820k players are still somewhat active on the title, though differing from the 345K DAU from Alinea.

The other interesting thing is that Marathon’s median and average playtime hours are actually quite strong. For a game that’s rather hardcore and only out a month, the average playtime hours on Steam is floating around 27.8 hours, with the median sitting lower. The average takes the total accumulated playtime of Steam users and splits it out among all hours, divided by all players. Meanwhile, the median goes to the exact middle point in the data set of where the players realistically sit, where the playtime whales carry the players with much shallower playtimes.

Even more telling is the deep engagement data. A staggering 22% of the Steam audience has surged past the 50-hour mark, and nearly 7% have already logged over 100 hours as stated by Alinea. Compared to PlayTracker, its data fields only go to 67 hours, but 10% of player base sits on that 67+ hour slot, which shows that it is plodding along rather nicely for the PvP enthusiast crowd. This data suggests that once the Bungie magic clicks, it hooks players deeper than the average extraction shooter.

Console players are also putting in respectable hours, though trailing Steam’s hardcore engagement. On PS5, Marathon’s average playtime sits at 16.5 hours, while Xbox players average 17.3 hours. The gap between Steam and console playtimes reflects both platform preferences and the PC shooter community’s tendency toward deeper time investment in competitive titles.

Considering it’s a premium title and that it’s rather hardcore, it shows that Marathon is keeping players locked in. Sure, there’s gradual decline in player base as is expected almost one month into launch, but considering the large drops it had from the first few weeks indicates that those who get it are sticking around.

Staying power

The weekend returns of Ranked and Cryo Archive is only going to do that game well for keeping players retained for weekend sessions, while casual players also get to loot harder maps while the big loadouts fight on the weekend maps and modes. So, Marathon is getting into a spot where casual players have less competition catching up, and the hardcore players have reason to log in for peak playtime slots.

Of course, Marathon still cost a lot to make. Can this strong yet stable player count and base maintain the money needed for the game’s production cost and ongoing seasonal content? Hard to say. We know Destiny 2 didn’t peak at launch, and captured more players over time. That could happen here. But, we can watch and see Marathon hone in on that competitive market and that’s certainly exciting anyway.