Sure they can't be happy they spent 3.7 billion to buy this live service studio and thats a good thing imo because Sony butchered their studios to push live service but thats not what were arguing here, its about obessing over steam charts player numbers to determine if a game is done or not. Steam charts dont decide everything for a game as pointed out theres plenty of live service games that has only 10-20-30k players and is thriving just fine and they aint no small budget games either as I pointed out FF14/The division 2/halo infinite as examples.

I can't find any official numbers for any of these games budget all I see is a bunch of guestimates from journalist and so called insiders. which again I said it before all the doom posting and expert takes here are all based on steam chart player count and hunch. 

And yes arc raiders players have been dropping for months the numbers are right there on steam charts.

As I've said the concern is that it's been steadily dropping with no signs of slowing down. If it stabilizes in the 10-15k range then that'll be fine though still not ideal while it'll be a very different situation if it drops below 5k and still hasn't stabilized.

This article goes into the budget of AR a bit and I never said it hasn't been dropping for months. You said its drop has been more massive which is false, its trajectory has been way, way better than Marathon's. You're surely capable of understanding the difference between a game that goes three months without starting to lose its player base and still has over 100k peaks on Steam everyday 5.5 months later versus Marathon's situation in its first 5 weeks.

The Arc Raiders comparison highlights why concurrent numbers are bad for interpreting trends. Arc Raiders sold 4m in its first 2 weeks and had a peak of 481k. By February it had sold 14m and had a daily peaks around 200-250k. It had 250% more players at that time but half the peak CCU. So player retention was very low, but replacement rate was incredibly high.

If Arc raiders had been front loaded in sales then it's player graph would look exactly like Battlefield 6. The pure retention rate is basically the same.

Retention rate is a massive misconception when it comes to live services games in general. Mostly it's not the same people playing a game that was playing 3-4 months ago. The player base is generally in a constant state of dropout and replacement(which can be returning players). A stable playerbase just means dropout rate and replacement rate are equal. Like I said Sea of Thieves has sold around 12m copies on Steam without ever having more than 66k concurrent players. Most premium live service games are a similar story. They have very stable sales and a constant churn or players. 

If thats a concern to you then yeah any live service games can drop below those ranges on steam but still doesnt mean the game will shut down like I said Halo infinite/ grounded 2 / Sea of theives has less than 10k players on steam weekly at best and servers are still up.

That link doesnt really add anything new to the ones I posted, still has no confirmed figure directly from the devs or publisher they are just estimating and guessing the ballpark. 

I was talking about the drop from its launch figures to where it is now that is massive and what difference does it make if Arc held on to higher player count a few months more than Marathon. Arc has already dropped below 100k players average whos to say where it will be next month or two, 60k then 40k next? thats hardly much better than where marathon is now and Marathon actually has been hovering at 25-30k for weeks now in fact it went from 25k last friday to 27k weekend so its actually stablizing not "dropping with no sign of slowing down"

pretty much, the obsession with steam player count to conclude if a game is successful or not is so misleading. It reminds me of the time people used amazon weekly sales ranking to draw a conclusion if a game or console is a sales success or flopped.

"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." Did you somehow miss this? You're responding to something I never said mate.

You clearly didn't bother to read the article I linked since the literal CEO of Embark said that a 75 million dollar estimate wasn't that far off which confirms it's not that much more or less than that.

The obvious difference is that it holding that high for that long means it sold a ton since for a while loads of new people were buying and trying it out replacing the people who were leaving. The main point you're continually missing here is that Marathon cost a lot of money to make so its performance so far is concerning. If this was a game from a modest sized studio with a modest budget the performance so far would be way better.

For most games selling 1 million copies would be amazing but if something like the next COD only sold that much it would be catastrophic. Context is extremely important in determining things so you should really try to keep the context of each individual case in mind. Also you're just making things up with those Marathon numbers. The chart I posted clearly shows that last weekend it peaked in the mid 30's while for this one it's gonna peak in the mid-high 20's. That's a notable drop week on week.

This is literally the topic and the title of the thread and what everyone here is arguing back and forth - "WILL MARATHON SURVIVE" poll options - "WILL NOT LAST A COUPLE OF WEEKS" / "WILL NOT LAST A FEW MONTH" / "WILL BE A BIG HIT". I never argued that Sony isn't happy I actually agreed with you or did you miss that? "Sure they can't be happy they spent 3.7 billion to buy this live service studio and thats a good thing imo because Sony butchered their studios to push live service".

I clearly did since its the exact same content the other article have. All the CEO did was throw in a vague answer without confirming and giving exact firgures. Whats "close enough" to the CEO? 5-10 million less than the guesstimated budget? 10-20-30million more than the budget? for all we know 50m more is "close enough" to him. And once again I ask do you have a link to marathon's official budget? Your argument is Marathon's budget is way higher than arc. Sure it could very well be but where is the official statement from the developers or Sony to confirm this? All I can find is another Paul tassi rumour mill, this is the same guy who claimed Sony paid for Black myth wukong to have a PS exclusivity deal then got shut down by the developers themselves with an official statement addressing his false claims.

So it went from 35k last weekend to 27k this weekend and my exact statement was - "Marathon actually has been hovering at 25-30k for weeks now in fact it went from 25k last friday to 27k weekend".

So not only that it has stayed within 25-30k, it also went up from last Friday to weekend(as I said) clearly shown on the screen shot above. You wanna tell me again who's making up numbers? and this is a notable drop according to you (7k drop). Let's have a look at Arc raiders numbers last weekend to this weekend.

Thats a 37k drop from last weekend. And once again Arc raiders just dropped a big update to the game these numbers should be soaring up.

Yup, this empty negative hype train just tells on it´s self continually. 

¨ The main point you're continually missing here is that Marathon cost a lot of money to make...¨
This kind of ¨point¨ actually has ZERO bearing on whether Marathon will ¨survive¨ or not. Zero.
For sure it can be a bad investment outcome, but forever fixating on this is just crying about spilled milk.
Having gone thru develoment hell by mismanagement and having blown way too much money,
doesn´t actually have any bearing on whether the resultant product is self-sustaining and profit bearing.
In fact, having lost lots of money doesn´t have any bearing on whether it´s a good idea to invest further money.

For all the ¨concern¨ about whether this game ¨survives¨ or not, I see ZERO mention of it´s microtransactions.
You know, the thing people love to complain about it being a live service game etc.
Except it´s model has been sub-AAA $40 price with unlimited gameplay, and only cosmetic microtransactions.
And AFAIK their post-launch cosmetic releases have been garnering positive feedback (in contrast to launch options).
That is only a positive trend in regards the game´s ¨financial sustainability¨, yet ZERO mention here.
I´m not saying this instantly turns the game into profit factory, but how can something so relevant be so simply ignored?

Oh, because these people aren´t serious about their own topic, never mind not being engaged with the game itself.
I honestly don´t get it, why somebody who isn´t into a game or even the game´s genre could care so much.
If I don´t like My Little Pony farm simulators, I´m really not going to spend much time ¨worrying¨ about one such game.
If somebody doesn´t like 4X Strategy games, they don´t make posts upon posts in forums discussing a new 4X strategy game.
This whole topic is driven by click farming social media hype aimed at people desperate to distract themselves.
They fixate on the most superficial ¨big scale¨ number source they can concptualize as authoritative truth,
yet can´t move beyond that to truly engage in the topic, because that would demand real thought and engagement from them.

You implied I thought it was gonna get shut down when I had already made it clear I wasn't referring to that and was talking about the impact on its long term support instead. If you agree that Marathon is off to a concerning start then I dunno what the point of all this is.

That's false. The one you shared did not have the part about a 75 million dollar estimate not being that far off. That's additional context since it means it might be under 100 million whereas before it could've been 150 million. For Marathon Bungie is a much bigger studio than Embark. Since July 2024 they've had over 800 employees, had over 1300 from October 2023 till then and over 1600 before then. Embark has under 400 in comparison and is a Swedish studio so the average salary there should be lower than it is for the American Bungie.

Are you really unable to comprehend the Steam concurrent players chart properly? The notion that it's been hovering from 25-30k for weeks is either an extremely blatant lie or you can't understand the data since last week was the first time its peaks dropped under 30k. Yes it was slightly higher Saturday than Friday. That's completely normal since people have more free time on Saturday on average. That's why you compare week on week like I did. And I already went into why the Arc Raiders situation is different. It dropping now after being stable for a few months and selling over 10 million is completely different from Marathon's first few weeks. Unless you're somehow arguing that Arc Raiders hasn't been a massive success then I really don't know what you're doing here.

It has a clear bearing on how much long term support Sony will decide to give it and will impact Bungie's long term future obviously. The microtransactions part is why its steadily dropping player base is concerning. There will be a huge difference between it stabilizing at 10-15k and dropping below 5k for that. And this is a video games sales data website/forum. Of course a new release from a studio like Bungie is gonna get a notable amount of discussion.

In regards to the Marathon budget it should be noted that only 300 people at peak development time worked on Marathon. Before the layoffs, when Bungie had 1200 people, it was even less than 300. Project Payback got cancelled in June 2024 and the whole team got moved onto Marathon at that point. 

The Marathon budget is probably not a big as people have been calculating as there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about the game being a large core development for Bungie when in reality it appears to have been more of a side project that got kicked into primary place when other projects got cancelled and they chose to run with Marathon. Even then the majority of the studio are working on something else.