Marathon sale and staffing

Bungie’s new shooter Marathon is on sale seven weeks after launch, while more of Bungie’s developers are now assigned to Marathon than to Destiny 2. (ixbt.games) (forbes.com) Marathon launched on March 5, 2026. Bungie had set the game at $39.99 before release, and this week the standard edition dropped 20% to $31.99 across Steam, Xbox Store, and the PlayStation Store in at least some regions. (bungie.net) (comicbook.com) (ixbt.games) Forbes reported on April 22 that, of Bungie’s roughly 800 remaining employees, staffing is now “more evenly split,” with Marathon edging past Destiny 2. Paul Tassi said Bungie sources had confirmed the shift, while noting that some support functions are shared between the two games. (forbes.com) Marathon is a paid extraction shooter, a format built around short runs where players enter a map, collect gear, and try to leave alive with what they found. Bungie told players before launch that the $39.99 purchase would include free gameplay updates, new maps, new Runner shells, events, and non-expiring rewards passes. (bungie.net) The staffing move comes as Marathon’s public PC numbers have cooled from launch. SteamDB showed an all-time peak of 88,337 concurrent players on March 6, and about 5,655 players in game when its page was captured on April 22, with a 24-hour peak of 18,360. (steamdb.info) A month after launch, Forbes reported that Marathon had sold about 1.2 million copies across platforms, citing Alinea Analytics figures that Tassi said Bungie sources described as close to accurate. That same report said Steam accounted for about 70% of the game’s population, with PlayStation 5 at 19% and Xbox at 11%. (forbes.com) Bungie has not announced any cutback to Marathon’s content plans. Tassi reported on March 24 that work was continuing on future seasons, even as he said the game’s launch numbers were lower than Bungie and Sony likely wanted for a project he said had a budget above $200 million. (forbes.com 1) (forbes.com 2) Destiny 2, meanwhile, is still active. Bungie’s site continues to promote The Edge of Fate as the start of the game’s next saga, which makes the internal headcount shift notable less because Destiny 2 is ending than because Marathon now appears to be Bungie’s larger day-to-day development priority. (bungie.net) (forbes.com) The immediate test is whether cheaper entry and heavier staffing can lift Marathon’s player base faster than it falls. Seven weeks in, Bungie is still adding updates, still selling the game, and now putting more of the studio behind it. (store.steampowered.com) (forbes.com)