Marathon fans fret over Steam numbers as a Finals player urges calm

Bungie’s newly released sci-fi extraction shooter Marathon has sparked a persistent debate over how many players are active on Steam. Many in the game's subreddit worry the player count is too low and could spell trouble, and the conversation grew so heated that a player from the less-popular FPS The Finals stepped in to urge calm.

When Marathon launched on March 5 it saw a big PC spike, with SteamDB showing a peak of nearly 90,000 concurrent players. Over the last 24 hours that figure fell by more than 50 percent and at one point dropped below 32,000. Posts tracking the charts proliferated on the subreddit, and moderators began removing many of them as users grew tired of the doomposting and comparison threads.

User In_Dux, who plays The Finals, urged fans to stop fixating on raw numbers. "Y’all got to let the numbers talk go," they wrote, and added that The Finals itself shrank from a December 2023 launch peak of over 240,000 players to about 50,000 by January 2024, later stabilizing around 10,000–20,000 concurrent players.

bungie, marathon, steam, steamdb, concurrent players, player count, subreddit, the finals, launch spike, doomposting