FatZilla said:
You own comparison shows its bearly scraping by and falling fast. Your comparing it to a 2 year old a 1+ year old game with actual sustained numbers now who had peaks of close to 500k and 750k players. This games peak of 88k, with already dropping weekly sustained counts, now in the 50ks with lows at 25k, isnt even comparable to those 2. Arc raiders is more comparable for recent games and it sustains 200k on average now during play times with a peak of almost 500k.
The only thing falling fast is your argument.
Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty are huge existing IPs that have existed for decades at this point. Marathon is for all intents and purposes a new IP. Most new IP are not going to have a huge peak CCU. Battlefield 6 released months ago, not 1 year+. Same with Call of Duty. Both have lower CCU than Marathon. Both of these games are considered "successful".
There are countless examples of Shooter titles that sustain 10-20k for years and are successful. Examples: Hunt: Showdown and Escape from Tarkov. None of these titles had massive peak CCUs.
Live Service executives judge success by long term player retention and engagement. A game can have a high peak CCU but cratering engagement and fail; conversely, a game can have a relatively lower CCU but high engagement and succeed.
Marathon is not "cratering" at all. Cratering would be a Highguard situation. Highguard peaked at 100K and a few days later was at 10k, despite being a free to play game. A week later, it was in the single digit thousands.
Marathon, between the open beta and live game has sustained over 60k CCUs
Peak CCUs is a horrible metric to judge long-term success. Even just looking at something like Metal Gear Solid Delta: Peak CCUs were 19k and now only a few hundred are currently playing it, and yet it has sold over 2 million copies and that's just a remake.
Your comparison to Arc Raiders just shows how delusional you are. You're using as a point of comparison one of the most viral success stories in the genre as if that's the only measure of success. Two things can be true: Arc Raiders can be massively more successful than many other titles in the genre, and Marathon can do far worse than Arc Raiders and still be successful. Arc Raiders is likely pushing into 20 million units sold this year. Marathon could be a success with only 20% of those sales, and if you look at CCU counts (which again, you can't really extrapolate anything from), isn't an unreasonable estimate for Marathon in the first 6 months. Marathon is doing roughly 40% of Arc Raiders daily concurrent peaks.
