UNREAL: Bungie Spent $42,000 PER PLAYER on Marathon!

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]It's that time again. Everyone's favorite game to dug on. Bungie's failing Marathon. And this is Tuesday, Cinco de Mayo 2026. And Marathon currently has, as of recording, 8:40 p.m. Pacific time, 12,278 concordant players playing the game on Steam. And you know what? give it a little bit of a golf clap because it did surpass yesterday's peak of 13191 with 13 27 Oh, it's 13443.

[00:00:34]So, congratulations to Marathon. You You did not go down another day in a row like a cheap Well, we're not even going to go there, but shout out to Bungeie Bros.

[00:00:49]You did it, guys. You saved the game.

[00:00:51]and checking over on Flopathon.

[00:00:54]Something I found very interesting about this graph when you bring it to the one week, I think, don't hold me to this, but the oneweek trend is balancing out and seemingly almost going up based off of the amount of players. So, I think I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I think at this point Marathon has found the floor.

[00:01:26]And the floor is around 12,000 concurrent players.

[00:01:32]That that is not going to cut it. But but at least it's not going to the four digits yet. When that happens, oh man.

[00:01:42]Oh man. It's It's going to be interesting and very entertaining. We got Polish Savali saying the quote unquote state of the game according to a marathon subreddit. State of the game on life support. And looking at the marathon subreddit, guys, just it's so fun to dive into this to see how the Marabots feel about it. Marathon r/marathon one day ago. I love this game, but it's becoming unplayable.

[00:02:34]The hell did I just watch?

[00:02:37]I'm waiting for some sort of cheating or something. First and foremost, this game is absolutely amazing, but with the decreasing player numbers, the cracks of abuse of game mechanics absolutely start to show. This was in ranked and before anyone says, "Oh, maybe they teamed in game. We double checked players after we died and every team had a triage who was sublevel 50 bronze." They stayed back and push in waves, which means this was 99% organized and most likely boosting as other players of the stack were diamond plus. I really love the game and want to grind ranked for rewards and cryo for loot, but it's becoming increasingly impossible due to abusers or this one r/marathon.

[00:03:22]I really hope this game survives. I'll be honest, I haven't looked into any of the positive or negative feedback the community has given towards this game. I just play it because it runs well, plays well, and I go in with an open mind, I guess they meant to say, with my runs. Sure, there are things I wish they did there. Okay, so this is all [ __ ] because obviously they see the negative sentiment with the community, otherwise you would not post I hope this game survives. Sure, there are great things.

[00:03:50]I wish they did different and maybe added a few more maps and made different guns easier to get, but I really enjoy the game for what it is. I don't really care what the devs decide to do to ensure this game lasts, but I hope it's something done soon before it's too late. If you're not looking into the positive or negative feedback, how would you know with negative feedback even exists? Very strange. Let's jump over to a different subreddit that is dunking on this game right now. Would you believe it if I told you r/highard game? Concord 3 sales are facing some fierce competition from AAA juggernauts and they show a screenshot of Marathon at sales position number 227 being beaten by busbound and in canob beanie one store many stories not looking great. Polish continues marathon cheaters continue to thrive. Bungie's refusal to ban tool assisted cheaters is becoming more obvious as their desperate player retention problems continue as the next season wipe dawn on the player base. Will Bungie address this or maintain their most devout players? Live support. Is Bungie going to do anything about the ranked cheaters? I reported a full trio of cheaters who made me and my teammates came across every two or three games when it was outpost ranked. The guy was named SL Phil and was extremely blatant. Always running the gold errors RG. Today we decided to hop on perimeter ranked, wipe the first lobby, all funing games. The second match we had of perimeter, first team we fight is blatant cheaters just shooting at us off spawn. One of the guys didn't even have his Steam profile set up. No PFP, no name, no level, nothing. Like, come on, man. Just made an account and got right to it. If they don't do anything, the game is just going to die. First cheater. Ran into my first cheater today. Finally hit gold in ranked. And I understand that the skill This is, by the way, if you don't understand marathon, like it's plays for keeps. And if you die, you lose all your loot and have to start over. It really pisses people off if cheaters are in there just messing with you and breaking up the entire fairness of the overall game.

[00:06:05]Paul Tali says, "The growing number of cheat tools reported over the weekend should have opened everyone's eyes.

[00:06:10]Bungie isn't going to really ban anyone when Marathon has a retention problem.

[00:06:15]It's counterproductive. Bungie are willing to retain the hardcore players and cheaters, then ban them." And quote, tweeting, "Exo, Marathon has officially died. It's over for Bungie." And we got Noir saying, "What the hell happened with PlayStation? Everything they've been doing this year, it's been pure [ __ ] Marathon ugly as freaks and extraction shooter slop. Sons of Sparter God of War if it was a GBA game. Saros women are better off as lesbians because men bad Horizon Hunters Gathering Horizon but somehow with an uglier characters in live server slop with Fortnite art direction. They're still moving forward with fair games. I don't like Xbox but they've been clearing PS in terms of output for a while now. And then T-Bo, please pretend to love the things I love. If Marathon were such a good game, more people would be playing it. My other personal favorite. Haters just suck at FPS games and have shitty taste in art. I've gotten that one, by the way. Y'all act like Marathon is the only hardcore FPS to ever exist. And yes, there are some Marabots out there that are still running with the Marathon's such a good game. I wish more people would just give it a chance.

[00:07:29]marathon graph posting. They did and they said, "Fuck it."

[00:07:35]Or uh this one, rook. What people don't seem to understand is that you can't convince me Marathon isn't a bad game just because it isn't a massive hit. Oh, this is the cope. The cope's sinking in MY VEINS. MY ENJOYMENT OF THE GAME isn't tied to its Steam chart. Even if it were to shut down tomorrow, I'd still stand by all the praise I've given it. Hey, again, as we always say, I'm happy that you're enjoying the game. Most people aren't, and that's why it's failing. The Gaming Profit NYC says, "I've never seen the gaming media and influencers glaze a game so much, but the game still failed regardless. This needs to be a case study with all the journals and devs and all the Marabots out there trying to keep this game alive." Tweeted gaming journals. Damn it. Stay with me. Just stay with me a little bit longer. We can do this. We can survive. Polish de Marathon's wellness check day 61 patch day. The doctors say Marathon will pull through even as its numbers keep declining. Sony was a no-show in the ICU waiting room again. I brought flowers today. Pizza tomorrow. We got Jake Lucky saying Marathon has yet again softly hinted at a multi-yearlong plan for the game. Creative director Julia Nardan says they already know where they want to take the story over the next few years, which hold up, time out. Time out.

[00:09:03]This game has a story.

[00:09:09]You forgot a campaign mode, you idiots.

[00:09:12]God.

[00:09:14]Bungie had indirectly suggested a similar notion over a month ago, saying, "We are in it for the long haul with Marathon." I I bet you are. And you know what? We'll leave it at this because I I saw this and shout out to Polish Tomales for bringing this to my attention.

[00:09:29]Bungie spent $42,000 per marathon player. This is from Bertie, a smaller channel. I have not seen this video yet, but I was very interested in that in that title. So, let's let's check what he has to say about it here.

[00:09:45]>> For every 47 marathon players online right now, Bungie has one developer working on the game. If you think about it like this, that's 47 to1. And that ratio is the entire story. And once you see it, you just can't unsee it. Forbes just dropped the number. More than half of the Bungie's 800 developers are now working on Marathon. That's 400 plus people on a game with only 20,000 daily peak players, and it's only generating $55 million.

[00:10:07]>> Did he say Did he say 20,000 peak players? Cuz cuz, bro, I got news for you. Uh it it is now around 13,000 on a 24-hour peak. Uh it's it's gotten a lot worse.

[00:10:23]Almost half that total revenue and it's built on this $250 million budget. I literally personally sat down with a calculator and the numbers are worse than anyone is saying. This is the financial breakdown that nobody else is doing because most channels covering this game don't have a finance background. They're guessing and I'm actually doing the math. So about a year ago, the split was 550 on Destiny and 300 on Marathon. That was the public reporting from Jason Shrier. Destiny was the priority and Marathon was just the side project. Today there's more than 400 on Marathon. The split flipped.

[00:10:52]Bungie pulled people off Destiny to >> because Marathon was failing so bad.

[00:10:56]This is a all hands on deck. We need to save this game. Pull everyone from all the teams. Put them all on Marathon.

[00:11:04]Like that will somehow magically save the game.

[00:11:07]>> Throw at Marathon. And that's already a story. Destiny 2 fans are watching their game starve while Marathon just eats.

[00:11:13]You can see it in their content cadence.

[00:11:14]You can see it in the silence around the next expansion and you see it in their patch notes that just keep getting smaller and smaller. But that's really not the brutal part. The brutal part is what 400 developers actually cost. You see, Bungie is in Bellev, Washington.

[00:11:26]It's right outside Seattle. And it's >> one of the most expensive areas in the United States to hire talent. Right outside of San Francisco and maybe Los Angeles, Bellev, Washington is very high. It's one of the most expensive cities in the country to run a tech company. You got AAA developer salaries there averaging around $100,000 a year.

[00:11:45]And you got senior roles that >> I think uh it's it's much higher than 100,000. That's the low end.

[00:11:50]>> Push 150,000 plus. Take the conservative number 400 devs, $100,000 a year average salary. That's $40 million a year. And that's just in salary. And it's just the base price.

[00:12:01]>> And that's on the lowest possible end. I can guarantee you it's far more than that. Now, if we add 30% for the fully loaded costs, benefits, software, servers, HR, rent on a $100,000 square foot building, Sony's overhead, you're literally at a $50 million plus a year at least minimum. And that's just to keep 400 people employed on Marathon.

[00:12:22]$50 million every year and forever. To run a game that's currently made $55 million total since launch, the annual payroll is basically the entire lifetime revenue. That's not a sustainable business. That's not even close. The math doesn't really just add up to math.

[00:12:36]Now, stack the build cost. You got $250 million to develop. That's Forb numbers from Paul Tassy. And that's dev only. It doesn't include marketing. Doesn't include the anti-roll plagiarism settlement. Doesn't include the live ops team, >> which we still don't know what that settlement was. It probably wasn't massive. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was somewhere in the high six digits.

[00:12:58]>> Building the next year of the content.

[00:12:59]That doesn't include the server infrastructure. It doesn't include the cost of running customer support. real total spend. It's really It's got to be close to 350 to 400 million by year end, maybe more. I have no idea, but it's high. Marathon needs to clear 9 million copies sold just to break even on the total cost, and they're at 1.2 million.

[00:13:15]That's not a slow start. That's a 13% completion rate on the goal.

[00:13:19]>> I think the latest number was around 2 million sold. That's definitely not going to cut it, especially at a $40 price point and already starting to be discounted. Also, by the way, if you want the financial side of gaming that nobody else is breaking down, subscribe.

[00:13:34]May 13th, Sony earnings, season 2 launch, the microtransaction squeeze.

[00:13:38]I'm covering all of it daily. Back to the math. Here's where things get >> This guy's good. Like, I don't know anything about him. Uh, I'm going to give him a sub, though. He's got a thousand subs. Hold on a second. I gota I got to check into this guy here. 88 videos and he only has a thousand subs.

[00:13:55]He must have Oh, he must have a lot of shorts. Is that what it is? Uh, okay. So he really he really only has a handful of videos. I was like, man, 88 videos like this, he's he's very good.

[00:14:06]>> Really dark. Bungie can't just fire 200 people to right-size marathon. This would be totally brutal. Reputation damage would be even worse. And the people who leave first are the ones with actual options, meaning the senior talent that actually makes Marathon work. The mid-level grinders, they're going to stay and the senior architects are going to walk because that's how every gaming layoff plays out. So if you think about it this way, Bungie's stuck.

[00:14:27]It's too small to grow Marathon's audience naturally, and it's too big to keep paying 400 people on 20,000 players. There's three exits to this.

[00:14:35]You have number one, you have layoffs.

[00:14:37]Bungie already laid off 100 people in 2023, 220 in 2024, and that's 320 people in 18 months. Round three is on the table, and given the math, it's probably the most likely path. Number two is the free-to-play pivot. Let's drop this $40 price.

[00:14:52]>> Well, to be fair, number one and two are both on the table together. like layoffs slashf freetoplay >> completely mass market the game juice player accounts. It would work for the player account, but it creates this new problem is now you're going to have to refund everybody that paid $40 upfront and if you don't you're going to deal with lawsuits. But >> well, not necessarily. And maybe that's why they're waiting. That might be the full-on like if we keep it full price long enough and eventually go freeto play like after maybe they're thinking like after a year then it's okay. You don't have to refund people because that's what games do. Ain't no way this is going to make it the full year at full $40. Either way, that's tens of millions of dollars in either refunds or legal fees. Then you have number three is you just squeeze the whales, premium cosmetics, battle passes, paid weapon variants, like pretty much an Eververse 2.0.

[00:15:49]>> There's rumors of them already doing that with this game. So >> the Destiny 2 monization playbook applied to Marathon. The problem is Marathon's whales are leaving with the regular players. You can't squeeze water from a stone. Also, I wanted to mention that Marvel Spider-Man 2 cost Sony $300 million. Marathon's going to land in the same neighborhood once you stack the ongoing dev's cost. Sony spent blockbuster Spider-Man money on a $20,000 concurrent attraction shooter.

[00:16:14]The most successful single player IP they own costs the same as their dying live service shooter. That's >> Oh, by the way, you don't need to pay for the servers for for a Spider-Man game.

[00:16:24]>> Not a budget problem, that's a leadership problem. Somebody at Sony or Bungie greenlight a $300 million plus live >> both service game in a very very niche genre. In the same year, Concord shut down in two weeks after hyenas got cancelled, after XFantine died, and after Cycle Frontier actually shut down.

[00:16:41]Every signal said, "Don't make this."

[00:16:44]And what happened? Bungie made it anyway. And now the bill is coming due.

[00:16:48]Sony's Q4 earnings call is May 13th.

[00:16:50]This is the first time Sony executives have to publicly answer for Marathon to shareholders with >> It's May 8th. So that's actually as of recording this just just a couple days away. numbers, not some Bungie spin on it and not some Forb leaks, like real corporate accountability. And there's only two scenarios that are going to come out of this is that one, Sony writes down Marathon the way they wrote down Destiny 2.

[00:17:11]>> It's going to happen, by the way. Like, they're going to do something. I think even the biggest Marabot fans out there deep down realize that this is not sustainable. They got to have come to grips to it at this point. $24 million impairment charge in November 2025. If that happens again, that's the signal layoffs are coming. Number two is Sony defends Marathon publicly. Talks about the long-term commitment that buys Bungie more runway, but it's not going to change the math. But either way, you're going to find out who Sony actually believes in 17 days. Also, I want to point this out here. I want Marathon to work. I literally put in 150 hours into this game and I'm running this channel because I believe that the gameplay is genuinely peak. But I can read a balance sheet and the balance sheet is screaming right now. 400 events, 20,000 players, $55 million in revenue, 300.

[00:17:58]>> What are the Marvots going to say to this guy? He's like, I love the game. I hope it's successful, but guys, it's over, Mara Bros.

[00:18:05]>> $50 million plus in spend and a live service game in a niche genre, and it has no clear path to mainstream growth.

[00:18:11]Bungie's not running out of time, they're running out of the math. And there's no amount of patch notes or mid-season updates or community goodwill that is going to change that. Tomorrow, I'm going to be breaking down what Bungie's three exit paths actually look like and which one Sony probably is going to force on them. Subscribe so you don't miss it and drop one in the comments. Which exit do you really think Bungie is going to take? The free-to-play pivot, the layoffs, the microtransaction squeeze, and I'm going to pin the best prediction that ages the best.

[00:18:37]>> Uh my my prediction, all of them.

[00:18:42]Like literally all three of those things going to happen at once. increase the microtransaction prices, go freeto play, and have layoffs. Yes, that is my my guess is all of those things uh at some point. Who knows when? Kind of ambiguous, but again, this is uh Bertie Bungie spent $42,000 per marathon player. This guy's going places. I It only took me one YouTube video to know that this guy's got what it takes. And uh that was a a banger video. Very very well done. And it it should start to wake even the dieh hard of the most diehard marathon fans out there. Wake them up and say even the people that love the game are looking at the math being like the math ain't math. This can't work. There's big problems on the horizon. And like I've been saying from what feels like since before day one, they need to make a decision and they are not doing that. like [ __ ] get off the pot and they are somewhere in between forever in this weird abyss like that that is not gonna end well. I'll leave that there.