I mean, come on lol, 100% Evangelion.

Seems like Marathon is really dying.

It was slowly getting lower and lower CCUs but today the drop has been exceptionally harsh, not looking good for Bungie at all.

Seems like it has a core audience that is really loving the game but overall even players giving it a good chance are also dropping it quick.

They'll need to try something else, otherwise it'll be lucky if it lasts more than 6 months.

Marathon went from 49k peak to 56k on weekend and today it's 52k peak, what massive drop happened? 

I doubt marathon is in panic mode , for comparison the finals has 14k peak players and is still going, halo infinite has less than 5k players and went on for atleast 3-4 years before they finally cut support. Frag punk has less than 2k players and it's still going. Hunt showdown is stuck at 20k players and it's still going 8 years counting.

It's currently 12K lower than it was this time last Monday. And that represents a 25% drop from one week to another. It's a quite a big drop, indeed.

It has been dropping consistenty since launch, but today it has been particularly low.

Also Bungie has nearly 900 employees, and Marathon was supposed to be a hit. It's the opposite of it right now.

Sony will end up taking over Bungie leadership this very year if those numbers somehow don't raise a lot.

Sony's Lin Tao already public said Bungie is underperforming and its independence is getting "lighter" with it moving to maybe be integrated into PS Studios.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/sony-cfo-tells-investors-bungie-s-independence-is-getting-lighter-

Yeah the game is starting to settle into what it will consistently be. It certainly was never going touch the likeness of a Destiny level success. It's too dedicated to the hardcore of an overall niche genre.

Best we can hope for is Sony recognizing that Bungie is at least winning public perception of them. Still capable of making a high quality game. Because I think the industry needs to get back to recognizing that there's nothing wrong with games having a small but dedicated playerbase and that not every game needs to make all the money in the world.

If Marathon was a side projet while Destiny 3 was coming this year too, maybe they could leave it be for years, but as Bungie needs to bring back massive loads of money and Destiny 3 if it exists should just be entering production right now, so around 5 years in the future, I really can't see how Sony will let Marathon exist much longer.

How hard do you think it would be to Bungie to develop a Marathon side mode focused on PvE instead of PvP? People seem to love Destiny and Helldivers because of that (I would myself be a lot more open to it if it was PvE with actual progression).

That way the current Marathon that seems to please it's core but small audience can still survive but the assets and worldbuilding of Marathon can also appeal in a more progressive coop focused mode at the same time to a lot more players?

Lowkey, Bungie should've had a side team working on a Destiny 1 remaster or bringing back all the vaulted content from Destiny 2 as a sort of stopgap, but that's the last thing they seem to have resources for. Destiny 2 is in the middle of its biggest content drought in years, with nothing new in between to hold players over. The game's last update literally only had a single sentence for its patch notes lol.

Theoretically, there's nothing stopping Bungie from making a PvE mode. That aspect is already in the game. Even the endgame raid, Cryo Archive, is primarily PvE. Played for about 6 hours over the weekend and only came across other players twice. It'd be a matter of removing player matchmaking, adding more AI enemies, and of course creating interesting objectives to complete and suitable rewards to encourage players to try out the mode.

I wouldn't be surprised if that is something they're already working on.

Endgame content can't be the answer right now, they need casual, and casual people will not grind the entire week to do it, they would want a nice game to progress at their own peace and play with their group of friends when they are online, then those time limited content can just be harder events to try when you eventually get there.

They need to have something to attract people immediatly, and present them content suited to all kinds of skills and time investiment, maybe make the Marathon mode (current game) F2P once someone buys the side mode (new game) and vice versa, you buy 1 and get access for 2, regardless of that mode is your preffered, so you can eventually try both and the current Marathon becomes the endgame competitive hardmode to people that liked it enough to want more before content updates.