Despite the negativity, Marathon was one of last month's best-selling games, though there's a catch

Marathon was the fourth best-selling game (by revenue) in the US when it released in March, and the sixth best so far this year, according to market performance analyst firm Circana. That's quite the surprising statistic given the vitriol surrounding its very existence and the constant doom-watching of its Steam Charts. It's even more impressive when you consider that the stat is based on revenue (not the pure number of copies sold), since Marathon only costs $40—it's not a full-price game, pulling in $60 dollars a pop.

This means that Marathon, on the surface, beat out the likes of Pokémon Pokopia, Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Crimson Desert. In first place was MLB: The Show 26, followed by Resident Evil: Requiem which is still hitting hard in its second month, and then WWE 2K26 in third place, ahead of Marathon.

However, it's possible that this ladder is slightly different in reality. Circana explains that Nintendo doesn't share digital sales numbers with it, but I wouldn't be surprised if Pokopia was actually much, much higher—surely in the top three. Similarly, Crimson Desert's 15th place ranking doesn't take into account digital sales for the same reason, but the developer has revealed it's sold over five million copies in its first month alone. Senior analyst Mat Piscatella did add that Crimson Desert, MLB The Show 26 and Pokémon Pokopia led in Circana's initial projections, too.

Nevertheless, in such a crowded month, Marathon clearly made a dent at release, despite the naysayers. But with reports that Marathon cost over $200 million (remember that Sony also spent $3.6 billion acquiring the studio), it's also not the big hit either party would want it to be.

This strong launch, estimated at 1.2 million sales, hasn't continued into a consistently high player base in the weeks since, at least on Steam where we can view this data. A month later, the 88,000 concurrent player release day peak has dropped to roughly 15-20,000 daily concurrents on Steam, where it seems to be settling. Going forward, I'm most interested in how Bungie will support and hopefully grow the game—its latest battle royale-esque experiment is a great example of that effort.

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