Marathon is off to a good start with ‘very positive’ Steam reviews

Last night Bungie officially launched Marathon, its first brand new game in close to a decade. The game appears to be off to a good start with positive user reviews on Steam, but has it been enough? 

Marathon has launched to a 91% positive user score on Steam, based on just shy of 5000 English language reviews. This is a great sign for Bungie, as there were concerns of a mixed or negative rating for the game, but it appears the studio has managed to stick the landing. As always with a live-service game though, launch is just the beginning, and Bungie will need to keep the pressure on with regular content updates to stop the player base from dropping off, as it has with Destiny 2 over the past year.

At launch last night, Marathon managed to peak at just under 90,000 concurrent players on Steam and will have had many more players logging in on Xbox and PS5. While these are pretty good numbers for a launch, Bungie will be looking to see growth over the weekend as more players get time off work and school to play.

If that growth spurt doesn't hit, then Marathon will be quite a bit behind its closest rival, Arc Raiders, which had a peak player-count of over 460,000 players on Steam during its launch month, and still regularly brings in close to 200K concurrent PC players monthly.

KitGuru Says: Marathon didn't exactly get a burst of momentum over its server slam test last weekend, but that could have been down to progress not carrying over to the launch this week. It will be interesting to see how Marathon does over its first week now that the game is officially out. 

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