Bungie's big comeback outside Destiny was supposed to be a statement. According to one analyst, the numbers tell a quieter story.
Analyst Rhyss Elliott of Alinea Analytics estimates that Marathon, Bungie's new team-based extraction shooter, has sold approximately 1.2 million copies across PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC since launch. His verdict: it “hasn't exactly made the splash Sony and Bungie wanted, even if the game underneath the surface is a MASTERWORK of design.”
Where those sales actually came from
The platform split is where things get interesting, and a little awkward for Sony. Elliott puts Steam at "a little under 70%" of total sales, with PS5 accounting for roughly 19% and Xbox taking "a bit over 11%." That's a lopsided result for what is technically a first-party Sony title, even accounting for the simultaneous multiplatform release.
That Steam-heavy breakdown puts Marathon's PC sales somewhere around 800,000 copies. SteamDB's third-party owner estimate tools broadly support that figure, with three separate plugins landing at 835,100, 848,500, and 1.14 million owners respectively. The classic review-multiplier method (total reviews times 30) gives a similar result of around 884,640. The numbers converge close enough to treat Elliott's estimate as reasonable.
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These are analyst estimates, not official figures from Bungie or Sony. Platform fees, battle pass revenue, and premium cosmetics are not reflected in raw copy sales numbers.
The Arc Raiders comparison nobody at Bungie wants to make
The elephant in the room is Arc Raiders, which reached 12 million copies sold roughly two months after launch. Yes, Arc Raiders has been on the market longer. But the Steam concurrent user peaks tell their own story:
Elliott frames the gap around onboarding. "Players understand the Arc Raiders loop within 30 minutes, while Marathon's UI acts as a massive filter, chewing up newcomers and spitting them out before they can experience the depth of Bungie's signature gunplay and Marathon's awesome gameplay loop."
The UI criticism is not new. Marathon's interface drew complaints almost immediately after launch, with Bungie itself soliciting player feedback to ensure players can "read what's happening mid-fight." That's a significant admission for a studio with Destiny 2's pedigree.
Marathon's contested HUD layout
Beyond interface friction, there's the question of approachability at a genre level. Marathon is, by design, a hostile game. It leans hard into lose-everything PvP tension, which is a legitimate creative choice, but one that narrows the audience considerably compared to Arc Raiders' more welcoming PvE-adjacent structure. The Server Slam data reinforces the difference: Arc Raiders saw an 80% jump in copies sold during its three-day Server Slam, while Marathon posted a 49% increase across the four days following its own Slam.
The players who stuck around are actually playing
Here's the thing: the retention numbers for Marathon are genuinely impressive among the audience that made it through the front door. Elliott reports that average Steam playtime has climbed to 27.8 hours, well ahead of PS5 (16.5 hours) and Xbox (17.3 hours). More telling, 22% of the Steam player base has crossed the 50-hour mark, and nearly 7% have already logged over 100 hours.
Daily active users peaked at 478,000 on the first Saturday after launch and had settled to 345,000 DAUs as of Elliott's report, averaging 380,000 DAUs across the weekend. For most games, those are strong numbers. For Bungie's first non-Destiny release in over a decade, developed by a large team in one of the most expensive metro areas in the US, launched while Destiny 2 itself is navigating a significant player dip, the context shifts what those numbers mean.
The key here is that 1.2 million at $40 a copy is not a complete picture. Battle pass sales, premium cosmetics, and platform-specific deals all factor into the actual revenue picture, and none of those figures are public. What the data does suggest is that Marathon found a dedicated core, but the broader audience that would have made this a franchise-defining launch simply didn't materialize. Make sure to check out more:
