This past weekend, all players got a chance to try Bungie's upcoming extraction shooter Marathon in a prerelease event dubbed the "Server Slam" meant to test the underlying infrastructure.
Though this technical aspect was no doubt a goal, this was also a major promotional moment for the game, as it usually is for these kinds of prerelease events.
Console data is unavailable since the Server Slam did not appear as a played game on user profiles, so let's dive into some Steam-only numbers.
Marathon started strong, peaking at over 140K concurrent players right away, but declined sharply the next day, settling into a daily cycle of 40-80K concurrent players for the rest of the weekend:
While it would certainly be best if it stayed strong, this is typical for pre-release events and similar to the Arc Raiders Playtest.
Extrapolating from PlayTracker user libraries, we estimate the total number of Marathon Server Slam players on Steam at around 1.8 million, with a median playtime of 2 hours.
The same technique shows ~2.2M wishlists of which only 28% played the Server Slam, as well as ~280K preorders, ~65K of which trickled in over the course of the weekend.
Bungie's brand loyalty is strong here, with 82% of Server Slam players having also played Destiny 2 - though the vast majority of those (77%) have not played it in the past 6 months.
Affinity for extraction shooters also emerges as an obvious factor. 58% of Marathon Server Slam players have also played Arc Raiders - the most recent hit in the genre. We also noted a strong correlation between a user's playtime in all extraction shooters and their playtime in Marathon Server Slam.
So, to summarize, what can we glean from these numbers?
With a decent amount of preorders, there appears to be a strong base for Marathon at launch, built on the demand for extraction shooters and Bungie's pedigree.
However, the Server Slam was far from a tipping point for the game, and it remains to be seen whether Marathon can start to build traction beyond that core audience when it launches.
