Bungie’s newly launched extraction shooter, Marathon, has sold around 1.2 million copies, according to a new estimate from Alinea Analytics. The report comes from Rhys Elliott, head of market analytics at Alinea, who posted the sales figure on X. Elliott also notes that PC leads in sales for the title, at around 800,000 copies sold on the platform.
Neither Bungie nor Sony has shared any official sales figures for Marathon, though Alinea’s numbers seem to dovetail with the figures from Steam’s player count lists. 1.2 million copies sold is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s a low figure compared with its peers in the genre. The Alinea report specifically namedrops ARC Raiders, which has sold 14 million units since it launched.
Elliott said in his report, “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.” He also sees Bungie’s paths forward as either investing in Marathon’s or cutting losses to invest in new projects.
One of the data points Elliott notes in the report is that less than 20% of Marathon’s sales are on PlayStation 5, despite it having Sony’s home-court advantage. Reports, such as one from Bloomberg earlier this month, suggest that Sony is considering pulling back on PC-based multiplatform releases for single-player games, but not for its online games. The sales of Marathon seem to bear out the wisdom of that approach for multiplayer games, if not single-player titles.