Three weeks after launch, the picture for Marathon is coming into focus — and it's complicated. Analyst Rhys Elliott from Alinea Analytics estimates Bungie's extraction shooter has sold approximately 1.2 million copies worldwide, generating around $55 million in revenue before microtransactions are factored in. Industry observers say those numbers align closely with Bungie's own internal data.
On paper, a million-plus units in three weeks sounds respectable. In context, it's a different story. Marathon is the first new IP from Bungie in over a decade, it carries a sky-high development budget that speculation puts in the hundreds of millions, and it's a first-party Sony title. When you stack all of that against 1.2 million sales — with the majority coming from PC via Steam rather than PlayStation 5 — the math doesn't add up the way Sony needs it to.
The platform split is particularly striking: approximately 800,000 copies sold on Steam (~70%), around 217,000 on PS5 (~19%), and roughly 133,000 on Xbox (~11%). For a Sony-owned studio releasing a Sony-funded game, leading on PC isn't exactly the ideal outcome. Bungie has already rejected speculation about scaling back or pivoting strategy, stating plainly that they're "in it for the long haul."
Not everything is grim. The game holds an 89% positive review score on Steam, and the engagement numbers among its core players are genuinely impressive — average playtime on PC has climbed to 27.8 hours, with 22% of Steam players having crossed the 50-hour mark. Peak concurrent players hit 478,000 on launch weekend before settling around 380,000 the week after.
Still, the comparison looming over Marathon is impossible to ignore: rival extraction shooter Arc Raiders has crossed 12 million copies sold roughly two months after release. That's a brutal competitive benchmark for any live-service game to sit next to.
The seasonal roadmap rolls on regardless. Season 2: Nightfall arrives in June, adding a new map variant, weapons, and the new Cradle system. Season 3 follows in August. Whether Marathon can build the kind of sustained player base it needs to justify its ambitions remains the open question — and it's one only the next few months will really answer.
