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Bungie has just rolled out what might be Marathon’s biggest update yet. The mid-season update adds a whole new PvE mode called Vault Breaker, and even though it has significantly upped Marathon’s player count, it remains unclear if it has done enough to appease Bungie’s PlayStation overlords.
Marathon's Mid-Season Update Adds PvE
Vault Breaker is a new take on Marathon’s gameplay that removes the ever-present threat of other players. Instead, you can either head into the game’s Cryo map alone or with teammates (up to teams of three) and battle through vaults with a predetermined loadout. Other weapons can be found as you progress, but will be left behind if you extract. The only rewards that come with you if you beat the Vault Breaker are currency-based.
The aim of adding a PvE mode is, of course, to attract new players who might not be interested in Marathon’s standard PvPvE nature, lure lapsed players back, and keep regular players playing by giving them a new experience. In the short term, that has worked. Almost 15,000 people were playing at the same time on Steam alone when the update went live, tripling the base Marathon has fallen to on the platform.
The thing is, 15,000 concurrent players still isn’t all that much for a live service game. By comparison, Marvel Rivals almost always has more than 100,000 players, while Apex Legends is still pulling close to 200,000 players every single day.
Before the Vault Breaker update, Marathon’s player count was consistently dipping below Starfield’s. Not only is Starfield a single-player game, but it’s one that many would consider a failure. The Bethesda project that didn’t land, which, in turn, has left us still waiting for The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5.
Is Marathon Doing Enough To Stay Alive?
That last point does prove that this is all relative. On the one hand, Starfield failed because it didn’t hit like Skyrim. On the other, there are still thousands playing it every day on Steam alone almost three years after its release. Most studios would kill for their single-player projects to be clocking up numbers like that so long after launch.
When it comes to Marathon, there are a lot of other factors to consider. For starters, Steam doesn’t tell the whole story. In fact, since Marathon is published by PlayStation, there’s a very real chance that the majority of its player base is on PS5, with those playing on Xbox to account for, too.
How Bungie has been treated by PlayStation since Marathon’s launch, however, suggests that the game isn’t performing as well as it needs to on any platform. There were mass layoffs at Bungie earlier this year as support for Destiny 2 came to an end. It’s unlikely the player bump from this week’s update will be enough to keep PlayStation happy about Marathon’s popularity in the long term, and it might not even be enough to get Bungie out from under the PlayStation microscope in the short term.
