Tomorrow marks the launch of Marathon’s Server Slam, a don’t-call-it-an-open-beta event that will let everyone into the game for a long weekend, and it will end just before the actual game comes out, and it starts charging people $40 to show up.
This is it, and I would argue more so than actual launch. It is exceptionally important to see how many people show up for a free look at a game, given that there’s no downside to try it, and if interest doesn’t translate into meaningful numbers, that is a very bad sign for a launch where it suddenly costs $40 to keep playing.
The other thing to watch here is drop-off. The infamous Highguard opened its free-to-play launch with almost a hundred thousand Steam concurrents, and lost half of those in just a few hours as players immediately bounced off the game. And in terms of Marathon, its lackluster summer alpha showed a player drop-off every single day it was live. You don’t want to see that again.
There are exceptions here, and things can go the other way. Direct Marathon competitor ARC Raiders had a peak of 189,000 concurrents during its open beta. Despite no longer being free after that, word of mouth and interest spread to the point where its launch window topped out at 481,000 concurrents. Wild. But expectations should be tempered, as Marathon is unlikely to catch ARC on either figure.
Marathon development has been so up and down, my sources tell me that a main point of relief is that it even made it to the finish line. Original game director Chris Barrett left Destiny 2 development back in mid-2019 to start developing Marathon, which led to a famously rad 2023 trailer. But in the spring of 2024, Barrett was fired by Bungie for alleged misconduct and is currently in the middle of a lawsuit filed against the studio.
Valorant’s Joe Ziegler was hired to lead things from there, which resulted in changes like hero-focused characters, a big departure for the genre. The summer of 2025 was a disaster. A lackluster gameplay reveal, an underwhelming alpha, and to top it all off, a plagiarism scandal that is still brought up to this day, despite reaching a “resolution” with the original artist. Then, a release delay from September to March after this chaos unfolded.
Things have changed a good bit. Marathon’s ad campaign, featuring vidocs, short films, cinematic teasers, gameplay, streamer partnerships, and more, has boosted its profile and convinced many that hey, this may be good after all. But through all this, after 6+ years, it is this moment, where potentially hundreds of thousands of players all get their hands on it at once, that will potentially dictate its entire future. You only get one chance at a first impression. Well, this would probably be the fourth chance or so, but this is the first time everyone can actually play, rather than just observe or test the game under small NDA events.
Launch itself is of course also hugely important; it’s just that these server slam numbers can point toward where things may be heading. Things are already starting to look pretty decent with Marathon making it inside Steam’s 10 highest-revenue titles even before the server slam has even started. This is not going to be Concord or Highguard. But it will also not be ARC, most likely, and it’s nail-biting time for Bungie, who badly needs this to be a hit. So does Sony, with a truly awful live-service launch track record. I’ll be tracking the numbers tomorrow, and, of course, playing.
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