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Marathon approaching 15k CCU low (sponsored by coachmcguirk91 - still having a blast)
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Came in at 3.5k as expected! It was actually 3,477. But took the snapshot when it rebounded back over 3.5k. Today should be somewhere between 9.5k and 10k. It's possible to go below 9.5k if the week over week % change is about -18% or worse.
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Hollywood Hitman
Gold Member
Dude it's absolutely wild how this is truly just consistently going down without failCame in at 3.5k as expected! It was actually 3,477. But took the snapshot when it rebounded back over 3.5k. Today should be somewhere between 9.5k and 10k. It's possible to go below 9.5k if the week over week % change is about -18% or worse.
IAmAnAgnostic
Member
Another all time low reached today. Current competition.
Moridianae
Member
Getting to 4 digit peaks I think will accelerate the decline.
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MayauMiao
Member
Probably huge Bungie fan but had to put up with Marathon until Destiny 3.
Angry_Megalodon
Member
Destiny 3, if ever happens, is still a long way to go.
Bungie only has Destiny 2, because whatever else the other team is cooking will EOS as soon as it releases.
DonkeyPunchJr
World’s Biggest Weeb
Wow why did it do so poorly yesterday? Was it because of Mother's Day?
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IAmAnAgnostic
Member
Actually, today (for the first time?) Marathon was below Destiny 2's playercount the entire time. Even during peak hours.
Destiny 2
Destiny 2
- 12,418 24-hour peak
- 11,616 24-hour peak
Johnny Concrete
Member
Haha
Definitely lost his gold key to a rat. Then rage quitted, wrote a review, burned his computer and moved to a small village in Scotland.
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Sohurmk833
Member
We're closing in on catastrophic failure player levels where the remaining players will have trouble to get a match.
Denton
Member
More players than Hogwarts Legacy? Take that haterz!
They have reduced the number of players/teams necessary to start a match, it seems. So it is not hard to get a match. But sometimes it is super quiet, like you might play for 25min and not see another team.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
My mistake. New estimate for tonight as the math in post #7800 was wrong.
Method 1
Yesterday's peak was 11.6k
Mon vs Sun decline is ballpark -9% lately = 10.6k
Method 2
Last Mon peak 13.2k
Week over week Monday is about -14 to -20%
At -14% = 11.4k
At -17% = 11k
At -20% = 10.6k
Tonight should be roughly 10.5 - 11k.
Method 1
Yesterday's peak was 11.6k
Mon vs Sun decline is ballpark -9% lately = 10.6k
Method 2
Last Mon peak 13.2k
Week over week Monday is about -14 to -20%
At -14% = 11.4k
At -17% = 11k
At -20% = 10.6k
Tonight should be roughly 10.5 - 11k.
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Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
I doubt Mothers Day had much to do with it.
My guess would be fatigue. The sweaty hardcore nature of the game is just wearing players down, and as playercounts dwindle the matchmaking times increase, thereby increasing the fatigue even further. The cycle just continues without fixes to reduce the fatigue by Bungie.
In short: the game is eating itself, by design.
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StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Had nothing to do with MD. I checked COD's CCU which has two very equal peaks - one Euro and one US. Similar to Marathon weekend peaks were Euro. But Sunday was the best peak day all week. And Saturday was higher than all weekdays too. ARC Raiders Sunday best CCU all week too.
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Johnny Concrete
Member
This could actually be a valid reason. It's incredibly focus heavy, constantly making life or death decisions.
At some point I feel like dropping it as well and I just want to play Diablo or some shit. Click spells on monsters and collect loot without having to think much or be on the edge of my seat all the time.
Shubh_C63
Member
Maybe Sony is like, damn this game is so bad and yet people keep playing it for 800hrs. Player retention must go from good to godly if we can actually fix our game.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
That was my main problem with Marathon during the server slam (I haven't bought the game), it just felt like work. Its very sweaty, hardcore, and extremely bad at respecting your time, seeing how you can die in a second or two and lose it all without any real ways of fighting back or preventing it. It felt more like gambling than playing to me. Arc Raiders has much better gameplay IMHO because fights actually feel like fights where you have a chance, in Marathon I often just died, nearly instantly, before I'd even know what was happening. It didn't feel good, it felt frustrating.
I play games to have fun, not suffer, and I suspect most other gamers do too. Bungie made a game which prioritizes suffering over fun, in my opinion.
Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
I agree with this. It's still my type of game but I think this is largely the reason why people are bouncing off at unhealthy rates.
I also expect it to be addressed for S2.
Moridianae
Member
I've said before in this thread the average age of a gamer these days is well over 30 years old.
Life's stressful. Last thing a majority of folks want to do is play a PvP game that is controller-chuckingly frustrating.
Yes, I know Souls games or CoD or really any game can be like that, but it's the inherent nature of an extraction shooter that probably doesn't strike a chord with people.
Life's stressful. Last thing a majority of folks want to do is play a PvP game that is controller-chuckingly frustrating.
Yes, I know Souls games or CoD or really any game can be like that, but it's the inherent nature of an extraction shooter that probably doesn't strike a chord with people.
ChorizoPicozo
Member
The Mad Draklor
Member
It makes S2 a fool's errand. Even if S2 addresses every single issue of the game (which is a wild assumption considering Bungie's competency crisis), the baseline is so low that the subsequent boost will be small.
Moridianae
Member
This will be always an excuse and cope. Marathon is simply a subpar game.
Okay.
BigBeauford
Member
Come on dog, top 20 steam games are filled with sweat fest experiences.
DonkeyPunchJr
World’s Biggest Weeb
I'm wondering why it specifically did so bad yesterday. Sunday was the lowest peak of the last 7 days. AFAIK that's the first time this happened.
Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
Only Rust really comes close to Marathon in terms of being a sweatfest with high degree of punishment. Everything else has crazy good SBMM and a much smaller degree of punishment.
Is Rust is less jarring than Marathon? I wonder how often it produces wet farts...I suspect far less.
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Interfectum
Gold Member
Current state of the game:
Moridianae
Member
ValiantInstance
Member
We're getting close to the stage where there will be points of the day where the CCU is higher on the Steamdb page of people watching the player count than actually playing the game.
Salmorejo
Member
They should make a game about that.
Zacfoldor
Gold Member
The Twitter hate mob was real afterall!Paul "Marathon Slayer" Tassi still hard at work fending off morons.
Join Taul and Grummz next week for their new podcast.
Plague Doctor
Member
Some asshole indie dev should make Steamdb watching into an idler.
That would be hilarious.
BigBeauford
Member
Not trying to be king dickhead supreme. The eating around the edges with Marathon is boring:
*woke studio with a large contingent of disaffected fans who pray for its downfall
*high barrier to entry that makes newcomers feel immediately unwelcome
*low TTK combined with a largely unwatchable product makes for very few viral moments (hard to discern what is happening by the viewing audience)
*ugly, genderless character designs and a lazy skin shop
*poor UI, poor graphical continuity
Fix all of this and MAYBE you can save the game but lets be real, this game cannot be saved. The masses have spoken.
Zacfoldor
Gold Member
Hollywood Hitman
Gold Member
Dude you throw that phrase around as if it's been a staple forever, even your games fucking lingo is retarded gay trash
Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
Semantics never interested me.
Johnny Concrete
Member
This is the exact opposite of Marathon.This will be always an excuse and cope. Marathon is simply a subpar game.
You have infinite time to think about a move.
You can say a lot about Marathon, but it's a very high quality product.
Hawk The Slayer
Member
Yesterday was the worst Sunday for them so far at below 15k ccu peak. Extremely low numbers for a high budget multiplayer game. Game is shit and looks like shit anyway so glad it's doing very bad.
calico
Member
I'm not proposing a return period; I'm proposing a guarantee against the game ceasing to function, as the fear of that is apparently what is killing it according to your fellow Marathon shills.
Most games wouldn't need such a guarantee to alleviate fears because they don't launch into a death spiral like Marathon has, or they are SP and don't rely on others playing it anyway. Tarkov's CCU is like a horizontal line compared to Marathon's.
Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
It doesn't exist for a reason.
Moridianae
Member
You can't fix outside of a FF14 style resurrection and that won't happen, given the losses.
calico
Member
What is the reason?
Currently #273 on Steamdb top sellers btw, two places above the Outbound Soundtrack. Spending on the game has effectively ceased at this point.
Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
No idea, but nobody else has implemented your idea so it's possible publishers don't view it as helpful or necessary.
calico
Member
Kronark
Member
This is the modern Bungie experience. This is all of Destiny. They have been like this for more than a decade.
What changes do you expect in S2 that will undo the grind or frustrations to the point that the game will be redeemed?
Destiny became a grindy sweat box because Bungie was chasing the hardcore / stream crowd. This kind of trapped them because that hardcore crowd eventually became their primary audience. They could not simultaneously satisfy that crowd and appeal to a wider casual audience that they needed to be sustainable. Any time they got close the sweats would start a shit fit about how much more hardcore the game needed to be. The Root of Nightmares raid from year 6 was a good example of this. It had more approachable mechanics, was similar in difficulty to older raids, was actually completable by casuals, etc. All the hardcore people bitched insesently that it was too easy because the raid race only took 4 hours instead of 24 hours and didn't require players to memorize 30 fucking symbols / callouts, as if either of those were some kind of healthy benchmark for the game to achieve. Bungie again listened to the hardcore morons and then we got Edge of Fate. The Edge of Fate raid race weekend was so bad that 70% of the teams that cleared it in contest mode, cheated to do it ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulta...top-contest-mode-clearing-raid-teams-cheated/ ). The game became so grindy with year 8 that even the hardcore players said fuck this and walked too.
The lesson that should have been learned from Destiny is that Bungie should have ignored the super hardcore people completely and focused on the larger general audience. There was an huge audience of "middle-core gamers" Bungie actively ignored. Gamers who would engage with the raids, dungons, and PvP, buy the annual deluxe expansion pass, but didn't want to bash their heads against -30 light level modifiers for 4+ hours to grind out a single adept gun with a bad roll. These people played Destiny and when Bungie stopped giving a shit about them, they walked. Bungie seems to have doubled down on the absolute sweatiest degenerate shit with Marathon. Cryo is everything that killed Destiny condensed down into a single event. It's trials and a sweaty ass raid merged together, with perma gear loss and a god damn entry fee on top. It's like these people don't learn from their own mistakes.
With the history Destiny in mind, I ask you, what would you actually change about Marathon? I've read dozens if not hundreds of your posts by now and I've seen you say S2 will fix the game repeatedly, but I've yet to see you actually suggest changes. Personally I'd ditch the extraction shit ASAP and explore alternative game modes, but given that you think that's foundational to the game, what actually needs to change to get 50-100k+ CCU? What small tweaks could possibly undo the hardcore focus? Does Bungie just need to shower people with loot to the point that gear loss doesn't matter?
Zacfoldor
Gold Member
The path forward for success now appears too unlikely and filled with obstacles.
It's only a matter of time before the community turns on Bungie.
They can't make a good game thru 2nd hand development from the nosebleeds. The advice they get is, "make it appeal to everyone."
That's not how you do it, lol. They already did that with this trend chase. Don't you see. Extraction shooter was trying to "make it appeal to everyone." A game that appeals to everyone appeals to no one.
PvE mode - either a quick sucky one that everyone will hate or one that is years out and will take tons of money and time to complete and only be like 4 hours long. It will take away from the actual game too.
Every new mode or map you add requires the population to support it. You are separating your players and additional modes risk killing your hardcore mode.
The game sucks for solos. They could make that less bad but imho that will just keep the players they have now from quitting as fast not draw in new ones. If they fix that the next thing is the game doesn't get to the good stuff until outpost and cryo which the vast majority of players will never see.
It's not good. I don't know how they will convince new players to buy this game. At the very least to make the game playable they need to add in a friendly zone with vendors.
The game is way too narrowly targeted. The people that left will want big changes to come back and that grind is legendary. Even if they do reduce it for S2 there will be people who want to come back, say they will come back, start that grind again, see it is much quicker now, and still quit after week 1 because S1 grind burned them out. Right after that wipe there will be plenty that are gungho but once they feel the treadmill they will go off to the first shiney new game that shadowdrops.
It's only a matter of time before the community turns on Bungie.
They can't make a good game thru 2nd hand development from the nosebleeds. The advice they get is, "make it appeal to everyone."
That's not how you do it, lol. They already did that with this trend chase. Don't you see. Extraction shooter was trying to "make it appeal to everyone." A game that appeals to everyone appeals to no one.
PvE mode - either a quick sucky one that everyone will hate or one that is years out and will take tons of money and time to complete and only be like 4 hours long. It will take away from the actual game too.
Every new mode or map you add requires the population to support it. You are separating your players and additional modes risk killing your hardcore mode.
The game sucks for solos. They could make that less bad but imho that will just keep the players they have now from quitting as fast not draw in new ones. If they fix that the next thing is the game doesn't get to the good stuff until outpost and cryo which the vast majority of players will never see.
It's not good. I don't know how they will convince new players to buy this game. At the very least to make the game playable they need to add in a friendly zone with vendors.
The game is way too narrowly targeted. The people that left will want big changes to come back and that grind is legendary. Even if they do reduce it for S2 there will be people who want to come back, say they will come back, start that grind again, see it is much quicker now, and still quit after week 1 because S1 grind burned them out. Right after that wipe there will be plenty that are gungho but once they feel the treadmill they will go off to the first shiney new game that shadowdrops.
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Pop
Member
That's correct. Even the Bungie of Destiny 1 is long gone. They don't have it anymore, just plain suck now
ChorizoPicozo
Member
Boys, it is a great time to be a marathon hater. The collapse is one of the most enjoyable things in gaming that I have ever seen in my life.
The creator characterizes the recent performance of Marathon as diabolical, citing a series of sharp declines in player metrics:
- Retention Rates: The game has historically lost roughly 20% of its concurrent players between Sunday and Monday (0:02:28-0:02:35).
- Recent Dip: Between Saturday and Sunday, the player base experienced a significant drop from 14.5K to 11.6K (0:02:42-0:02:51).
- The Monday Slump: Describing the performance as diabolical, the creator highlights that at 10:00 UTC, the concurrent player count fell from 5.6K on Sunday to 3.7K on Monday, marking a loss of roughly one-third of the active base (0:03:25-0:03:41).
- Platform Dominance: The creator dismisses console relevance, claiming that 70% or more of the player base is situated on Steam, while consoles contribute effectively 0% to the game's actual sales volume (0:07:32-0:07:46).
- Mass layoffs: He anticipates that Bungie will soon initiate mass layoffs to cut costs (0:06:24-0:06:30).
- Corporate restructuring: He predicts that Bungie will undergo significant corporate restructuring, noting that this is the modern equivalent of a company failing (0:08:51-0:09:21).
- Game lifespan: Regarding Marathon, he expects that even if it hits a very low player count, it will likely be kept alive for a year or two before being shut down (0:05:54-0:06:01).
- Current Status: The speaker asserts that Marathon is now consistently underperforming, often reaching a point where even Destiny 2—described by the creator as an "abandoned" game—maintains higher average concurrent player counts than Marathon (0:05:39-0:05:50).
- Satirical suggestion: As a cynical prediction, he suggests that hiring Anita Sarkeesian might be the studio's next move, though he acknowledges it would not save the game (0:11:13-0:11:34).
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