Bungie’s Marathon Has Lost 96% of Its Players

88,337. That’s how many players were connected at once on Steam six hours after Bungie’s Marathon launched, on March 5, 2026. By September 24, 2026, the game’s daily peak no longer topped 3,000 players, a 96% drop in just over six months.

Faced with that collapse, Bungie is changing course. The studio, owned by Sony, is dropping the seasonal schedule that had structured Marathon since launch, pushing its major update back to December 8 under the name Symbiosis, and moving away from a pure extraction shooter (a game where you enter a zone, grab loot, and have to get out alive against other players and AI enemies). Rescue or reprieve? Two dates, October 6 and December 8, will answer that.

Bungie’s Marathon: a curve that keeps falling

The game launched on March 5, 2026, on PS5, PC via Steam and Xbox Series X/S, at $40, a paid title rather than free-to-play. Reviews were fairly kind: 81 on Metacritic for the PC and PS5 versions, 83 on Xbox, and a 74% recommendation rate on OpenCritic.

Players didn’t stick around at the same pace. Before launch, the public “Server Slam” test had drawn 143,621 concurrent players on Steam. The launch peak, reached six hours after the game opened, topped out at 88,337 players. A month later, that peak had already lost 59% of its height. Five months after launch, Dexerto, which tracks the game’s numbers on an ongoing basis, measured a 24-hour peak of 3,507 players. By September 24, 2026, according to The Game Post, that 24-hour peak barely topped 3,000 players, around 96.5% below the launch figure.

In the same post, the studio also drops the fixed calendar that had paced its major updates: “We’re also moving away from a strict seasonal schedule. Instead of tying major updates to fixed seasonal deadlines, we’re giving the team more flexibility to build, test, and improve features before they are released.” With Symbiosis, Bungie is betting on time, not the calendar.

A first step arrives sooner, on October 6: a reset of progression and the game’s economy, refreshed rewards, a new battle pass (the seasonal track that unlocks cosmetic rewards as you play), and several quality-of-life improvements for new players.

Symbiosis is set to bring a new Runner shell (a new playable character), a permanent PvE experience, a first for the game (a mode against the environment and computer-controlled enemies, with no human opponents), a reworked Perimeter zone, a social space with a shooting range, an experimental team deathmatch mode, and smoother onboarding for new arrivals. Bungie sums up the ambition in one line: “Marathon needs more depth, more variety, stronger progression, and better reasons to keep playing over the long term.”

Why it might not be enough

Bungie’s Marathon remains a $40 game, not a free-to-play title you redownload without a second thought: every player the studio needs to win back has to pay for their ticket again. And the studio’s financial situation doesn’t help. In May 2026, Sony took a $765 million writedown on its Bungie acquisition (an accounting loss that records the investment as worth less than expected). In June, layoffs hit most of the Destiny 2 team and part of the Marathon team. Two months after launch, the game “did not meet sales expectations,” according to its Wikipedia page.

Bungie acknowledged as much publicly in September: the game “did not reach as many players as we had hoped.”

The wider industry isn’t helping either. This year, Heart Machine laid off “almost everyone” and Polyarc shut its doors two months after its last Moss release. By contrast, WARDOGS sold over a million copies at its early access launch on Steam, proof that a successful launch is still possible, on the same platform, at the same moment.

On Push Square, Robert Ramsey headlines Marathon’s “questioned” future. On Aftermath, Gita Jackson describes herself as cautiously optimistic, but worries that Bungie’s pivot for Marathon might arrive “too little, too late,” given the layoffs and the studio’s financial troubles.

What to watch next

For Bungie’s Marathon, two dates will serve as the test. On October 6, the progression reset and new battle pass will show whether some of the players who left come back for a fresh start. On December 8, Symbiosis (new shell, permanent PvE, experimental team mode) will be the real verdict: it’s the update Bungie has explicitly built to last, at the cost of a delay of more than two months.

In between, the number to watch stays the one that opens this article: the game’s daily player peak on Steam. It will take a clear rebound, not a one-week spike, to say Bungie’s Marathon has turned its curve around.