After a turbulent 12 months building to its delayed launch, Marathon is finally here. Bungie's first big game since Destiny 2, and the first title it has launched under the PlayStation banner. People have quickly compared early Marathon player numbers to Splay the Spire 2, which attracted half a million of you over the weekend. However, comparing Marathon's player count to how other live service games performed at release gives us a far better idea of whether Bungie's new extraction shooter has what it takes to stick around.
Let's get this out of the way early - yes, this article will only account for Steam numbers. I know that only paints part of the picture, as Marathon and most of the games I'm comparing it to are available on other platforms. However, numbers from those other platforms aren't available, and since I'm only including Steam numbers for every game mentioned in this article, the comparisons are about as fair as they can be.
Marathon peaked at a little more than 88,000 players on Steam when it launched last week, according to SteamDB. That number dropped by about 10k for its weekend peak, and while Bungie likely hoped that the peak...
