Marathon ‘Player Count Watching’ is ‘Unemployed Behavior’, Says Overwatch Dev

Everyone is concerning themselves with Marathon’s player count, one way or another. Either you’re curious to see if the game will fail, or you’re hopeful it will succeed. In recent days, we’ve seen social media channels packed full of people talking about the impending collapse of Marathon, which isn’t as likely as you might think.

This conversation has prompted developers far and wide to share their thoughts about ‘player count watching’. As you can imagine, they’re not best pleased with the rhetoric.

Is Marathon Dying? Who Cares?

In a post on social media, one user was talking about a ‘50% player count drop’ on Marathon, suggesting that, just days after release, the extraction shooter from Bungie is facing the abyss and is about to fall in. That’s far from the truth just now, but who knows, maybe one day.

In response, a senior designer working on Overwatch, Dylan Snyder, took to social media with a damning statement:

Is the 50% player drop in the room with us right now?

Feel free to dislike and pass up any game you want, more power to you, but this is big unemployed, maidenless behavior…

The ‘behavior’ Snyder is talking about refers to the personality that some build, which results in them doing nothing but talking about the ebb and flow of games on social media. It’s often accompanied by little more than numbers screen-captured from SteamDB, as that’s typically the only platform with public figures.

Marathon has, at the time of writing, dropped to 33,645 players from an all-time high at launch of 88,337. It is showing a negative trend, but this was almost to be expected. Extraction shooters aren’t the most popular games in the world, and they’re not adopted as quickly or widely as other titles.

Marathon also has a premium paywall in front of it. It’s not extortionate, but it’s something. There’s also the inherent complexity of the game and the niche art style. There are a lot of things that might prevent the game from getting the sweeping and universal praise some are hoping for, but the numbers it has right now a) aren’t indicative of the game on all platforms, and b) might be just fine for Bungie.

Do you think it’s acceptable to bag on a game every time it sees a drop on SteamDB? Let us know what you’re thinking on the Insider Gaming Discord server.

For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that GTA 6’s source code might be in the wild