For the last month Joseph and I have been playing as much Marathon as we can fit into our busy lives. During the pandemic, we bonded over playing Call of Duty: Warzone, and we\u2019ve been chasing that high for years with little success. Bungie\u2019s new extraction shooter finally gave it to us.\u00a0We should be happy, and we are as long as we\u2019re focused on the game we\u2019re playing and not the industry that\u2019s collapsing around it. Marathon\u2019s commercial success, measured by outsiders mostly by the number of people Steam shows is actively playing the game at any given moment, has no bearing on our enjoyment. But I can\u2019t help but follow those numbers because they are a reminder of how brutal the video game industry is right now, where it might be headed, and how viable Marathon and games like it are in the future.\u00a0We don\u2019t know how much Marathon cost to develop or what Sony Interactive Entertainment, which owns Bungie and is publishing the game, wants from it. The game has been a critical success, has reportedly sold 1.2 million copies, and players who have latched onto it like myself love how Bungie has been updating and balancing it after release. People are making horny fan art of Marathon characters.\u00a0\u00a0At the same time, I watch the number of concurrent players on Steam, currently hovering at between 20,000 and 30,000, and fret. Is that enough for Sony to support Marathon for the long haul, and is it enough for the rest of the industry that\u2019s watching this unfold to decide that the kind of player who enjoys a game like Marathon is still worth catering to?\u00a0Whether 20,000-30,000 concurrent players is a good number or not is relative and ultimately a decision only Sony can make. More than 19,000 games released on Steam in 2025 and only 6,000 of them earned more than $100,000. With at least tens of millions of dollars worth of sales on Steam alone, Marathon is one of the highest earning games on that platform. Marathon\u2019s numbers are also considerably higher than Sony\u2019s other big competitive shooter, Concord, which barely cracked 700 concurrent players on Steam before it was shuttered in 2024, barely a month after it was released. Highguard, another multiplayer shooter that was unveiled at the end of 2025\u2019s Game Awards, also shuttered just a bit over a month after it launched. It peaked at almost 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, but it was free to play.\u00a0One might naively assume that the basic math at Sony would be to see how much Marathon cost to develop and maintain, see how much money it\u2019s making after launch, and to keep the party going as long as it\u2019s turning a profit. The reality is probably a bit more cynical and complicated than that. Bungie is a big studio that employees hundreds of developers that Sony acquired for $3.7 billion. One line item on Marathon\u2019s budget that\u2019s extremely hard to calculate\u00a0 is the opportunity cost of Bungie making Marathon as opposed to the next Fortnite, now that it\u2019s becoming increasingly clear that Marathon will not be doing Fortnite numbers.\u00a0That doesn\u2019t mean there isn\u2019t a tremendously profitable business to be had there, given some patience and care. Ubisoft launched Rainbow Six Siege in 2015 to a tepid response, but has turned it into a decade-old cash cow with consistent support, updates, and a devious loot box-based monetization scheme. It essentially did the same thing for For Honor, a melee multiplayer game that I bet you forgot existed but that\u2019s been going since 2017.\u00a0But Sony is a publicly traded company that wants to show quarter over quarter growth, and a modestly healthy profit that also happens to keep hundreds of game developers employed is not what shareholders are salivating over. Sony wants to do Fortnite numbers, which is a very tall order considering that even Fortnite isn\u2019t doing Fortnite numbers anymore.\u00a0Our friends at Remap Radio have spoken at length about why discussions about player numbers teach us little about games and are often toxic. Part of the reason that games like Concord and Highguard can crash and burn so quickly is that the numbers become a self-fulfilling prophecy. There\u2019s skepticism about the game before it launches, and when it fails to go viral, people write it off because why would they invest their time in an online game with player numbers that signal imminent and unceremonious execution by its financial backers, which only leads to even lower player numbers. It also shifts the conversation entirely away from what the game is, what people like about it, and why, and to its business model, infecting players with the quarterly earnings report view of the world. Games and players become expressions and subjects of business models, and the part where we play games because we enjoy them are reduced to a curious byproduct of Sony\u2019s Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. Games from major publishers become either mega hits or are quickly slapped with the \u201cdead game\u201d label before they\u2019re taken offline. What the game actually was is barely relevant.\u00a0Everyone I\u2019m playing Marathon with is aware of the player numbers anxiety but is responding to it in different ways. Most of us are doing armchair video game industry analysis, while others are actively trying to enjoy Marathon\u2019s popularity while we can precisely because it may be fleeting and eventually unavailable to play. Some of us are buying in-game cosmetic items not because we want them that bad, but as a signal to Sony that there\u2019s money to be made here.\u00a0\u00a0Adding to this player count anxiety is the fact that the video game industry appears to be going through what is increasingly looking like a proper crash. I don\u2019t think we\u2019ll ever have another near extinction event like the video game crash of 1983, where for a moment it didn\u2019t seem like video games would even continue to be a thing, but a full one third of game developers in the U.S. were laid off last year, and the huge layoffs just keep on coming.\u00a0The question of whether Marathon is a viable business for Sony naturally leads us to the question: What business does Sony even want to be in going forward? Is it a business that\u2019s in continuity with the games we grew up playing on the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, or will the market force it to chase something like Roblox or other free-to-play models? Can this continuity even exist when a PlayStation 5 Pro now costs $899 and a PlayStation 6 will cost more? Those are prices for 30 and 40 year-olds with disposable income, not the younger audiences game publishers need to be winning over now for their future business. Sony and other video game publishers are already losing them to different kinds of games and forms of entertainment.\u00a0\u201cMarathon’s low gravity, bouncy physics, and methodical boot clunks echo Master Chief’s graceful, weighty gait circa 2004. It’s got modern conveniences like aim-down-sights, sprinting, sliding\u2014and yet Marathon evokes a more civilized age,\u201d Morgan Park wrote in his excellent review in PC Gamer. \u201cThose qualities make it more accessible to a range of people who struggle to keep up in faster games while maintaining a skill range in other disciplines: timing, positioning, and perception. It’s fairly easy to track targets, but you’re still rewarded for nailing headshots, taking the high ground, and utilizing shell abilities. Does that make Marathon an unc game?\u201dpic.twitter.com\/WgxIBEHd3g\u2014 \u5b9a (@de3dsoul) March 19, 2026
\nTo answer Park\u2019s rhetorical question for him, yes, Marathon is in fact an unc game, which explains both why I like it so much and why I\u2019m worried about its future. As you probably know, unc, short for uncle, is a way to jokingly refer to old, potentially out of touch people. As far as I can tell, it entered the video game discourse in the form of this meme in which a soyfaced unc excitedly points at the hall of fame of so-called \u201cunc slop,\u201d or, in other words, games that old people say are very good. Some of the games in this collage of video game box art includes Half-Life 2, Dawn of War, World of Warcraft, STALKER, Mass Effect, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Or, many of my favorite games of all time.Marathon could easily fit in that collage. It\u2019s excellent, and, I worry, catering to a dwindling audience of uncs who are having a great time while the culture and business of video games is largely moving on and eventually leaving them behind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"