That excuse doesnt work, CSGO is over 10 years old and has 500k + players , Apex is 7 years old and has 100k players, Rust is over 10 years old and has 100k player. so why is it an excuse for halo infinite / grounded / sea of theives etc to be doing less than marathon player numbers yet CS and APEX are older than them?  Mean while arc raiders is taunted as a "success"yet its gone down from 450k players to now below 100k in just a few months since its release thats over 60% players lost is just a short time.

All this further shows is how baseless all the steam charts player number doom and gloom posts are. it doesn't guarantee anything.

To throw more baseless steam chart numbers in comparison - Frag punk - has less than 2k steam players , The division 2 - has less than 10k steam players, FF14 - has less than 20k steam players. Yet they are still live and running for years. How can they survive for years but yet according to people here having 30k players on steam charts is a failure and doomed.

Cause some games are way more successful than others obviously. Halo Infinite didn't do anywhere near as well as CS and Apex. For Arc Raiders I'm sure you're capable of understanding the difference between these two pictures. If AR had peaked at 88k instead and was already in the 20's just a few weeks later than it wouldn't have been even remotely as successful. Though Embark would still be in a much better position compared to Bungie in that scenario since AR had a far smaller budget. I'm not saying Marathon has bombed but it having a concerning start is undeniable considering the circumstances.

The cold fact is that Sony needs successful live service to survive despite the purists saying they should ditch it for single player games which are becoming further and further apart in releases - without successful recurring revenue from their own studio's they will decline
For marathon Steam is now under 30k peak this week, heading out of the top 100 for unique players and is out of the top 50 for sales after 1 month - as mentioned above its not even charting on PS or xbox or features in their top 50 games played - I see this disappearing within the next 12 months.
We will find out next month as Sony's first quarter results will be out
I am expecting a second successive quarter of declining revenues
This is based on continual declining hardware revenue and the fact that they are shutting studios and pushing up pricing (despite telling us in the last results they had enough RAM to avoid price rises)
The decision to stop PC ports is short sighted (if true, I still expect Ghosts to arrive within this year) as Nintendo is now starting to eat into their third party sales and its looks like Xbox will start competing again by pulling back on ports
However this is just what I see, lets see what the financial report says next month

I'm not saying that Marathon is a big failure and we have to watch how the player numbers will develop over time (the average can also increase again with updates) but this is a bad comparison. 

Grounded 2: that's a "small" project worked on by a much smaller team and the costs to let the game run on the servers will need much less people as a competitive pvp game like Marathon. It's also a Game Pass title so Game Pass users don't need to buy it.

Sea of Thieves: that game is very old now and it's already above Marathon in the weekly most played Xbox charts. Marathon not even in the top 40 anymore. Not sure about PS because both aren't in the top 40 anymore.

Halo Infinite: also old now, not really considered as a success for MS but still a very important franchise for MS so that they won't let it fall. It's also already above Marathon in the most played Xbox charts. 

The Finals: well, that was never considered a real success. Seems to make enough money not to stop the support but maybe it's much more cost efficient as Marathon with probably some of the best paid game devs in the whole industry working on it. 

Exactly some games have way bigger player base than others yet that didn't stop those lower player count from staying live and going for years. Steam chart numbers isnt the end all be all that determines if a game will shut down or not.

Do you have a link to the budget arc raiders/marathon/halo etc officially from the developers or the publishers? where are you getting this budget numbers from to base your claims? Embark studio and arc raiders is far from being indie dev and indie game.

Look at arc raiders drop on that image is far more massive and is pretty much heading exactly to the same path as marathon and other live service games theres nothing alarming about that is just the way live service games are. To add more fun fact Arc raiders just released a big update last week and its still dropping usually when update drops player numbers soar up just look at helldivers.

Some of you guys are so dramatic. Just because you're no longer loving what a developer is doing doesn't mean they should cease to exist lol. 

For anyone who thinks the game will literally shutdown I'd just remind you that you can still play Destiny 1 on the PS3 servers. Sony published games like Predator:Hunting Grounds and Destruction All-Stars are still playable today.

Ceasing active development and shutting down the servers is very very different. A small playerbase also has a small server cost.

People talk about how much the game cost, but this hardly seems relevant to to whether they shut down the servers or not. You can still play Suicide Squad and Skull & Bones. 

Profits = Survival.

Playstation is very profitable and that isn't going to change any time soon and they haven't been dependant on live services to get here. Ironically these bigger gaps in profitable single player releases is mostly driven by their live service push. We would already have new Naughty Dog, Bend studios and Bluepoint (RIP) games out if it wasn't for live service attempts and failures. There are many more studios outside of this which that applies to as well

Live service push is a gold rush situation not a matter of survival

Thats exactly what im trying to say, just wait and see instead of doom posting every time steam charts for a game goes up or down. Steam player numbers don't guarantee if a game will keep going or not.

Sea of theives is younger than a lot of live service games that has over 100k player so that's hardly an excuse. It also has less all time peak players than marathon during launch day. Halo infinite also promised a 10 year support yet its been cut and dropped already only after 4 years....old or not that sounds more like a failure to me than where marathon is at. Halo is a flag ship franchise that used to sell 10m and push console sales now it has less than 3k players daily on steam vs marathon an IP that has been dormant and not touched from the 90s.

4 years into its ’10-year plan’, Halo Infinite is officially ending major updates | VGC

And do you have a link to show what exact player numbers xbox has for these games? Do you think theres some 100k players comming from xbox just because its on the weekly most played list? xbox has the smallest install base of any platform for all we know being in the top weekly played means a whooping 5k players and on top of that its also being thrown in subscription service giving easier access to play compared to paying $40 to get access like marathon. Like I said a lot of these post sounds like a bunch of hunch and feelings with no official confirmation.

I'm not saying it'll get shut down anytime soon, just that I doubt Bungie and Sony are happy with how it's performing so far which could impact its long term support.

For the budget of AR the head of Embark said that a 75 million dollar estimate wasn't that far off so likely under 100 million dollars. For Marathon there's nothing as concrete as that but there's been estimates of over 200 million or even over 250 million dollars and considering how big of a studio Bungie is it should have a much higher budget than AR.

And no the drop is not more massive at all. It stayed near its peak for months and have been pretty stable the past few weeks while Marathon has been steadily dropping week on week with no signs of that slowing down yet. They're completely different trajectories.