Marathon fans are hoping to hear something soon about season 3, which is meant to arrive in a few weeks with a big new PvE mode, a sharp change from the PvPvE focus the game launched with. The silence is not great, especially given the state of the game, which is becoming more problematic over time.

Marathon’s playercount numbers are not only a somewhat annoying spectator sport. At this point, the low concurrent figures mean it’s creating tangible problems in the game. Marathon sunk to a new low yesterday with a 3,261 peak on Steam, where, last I heard, the game has twice as many players on Steam as on consoles. In off hours, that’s much lower.

This creates two main problems, ones that are frequently shared on Reddit almost daily and pepper social media conversations about the game. The first is that the “niche” audience that Marathon attracts is now so cutthroat that it can often seem impossible to make any progress if you keep matching against those teams or even in solos. And of course, in an extraction shooter, it’s not just losing games; it’s losing all your stuff, which can create an anti-progress spiral it’s hard to escape from.

The limited playerbase means that there often are not players at a lower skill or experience level to match against, as if that were the focus, it would create extremely long queue times to find a game, which no one wants to see. So, to reduce that, you’ll often be thrown in a match with whoever is available. That is often the best-of-the-best players, given that they are the group still avidly playing the game after so many others have left.

This leads into the next issue, that the current situation makes new player onboarding almost impossible. Getting a new player into Marathon , which the game desperately needs to survive in the long term (or even medium to short term), is extremely difficult because of this situation. It’s not as if there’s some wide newbie pool to put these players in once they arrive and learn the basic mechanics. Sure, they are not immediately jumping into Outpost or Cryo, but obviously those are not the only maps veteran players are in.

The endpoint here is an overlooked reason why Bungie is turning so heavily into PvE all of a sudden. Yes, part of it is to appeal to the “I would play Marathon if it had PvE” crowd that has been around since even before launch, but it’s easy to see how it would alleviate some of the above issues. Matchmaking is no longer a significant problem when everyone is on the same team in the mode. Sure, it would be nice to have an all-star squad to blast through the bots, but lower-skill, less-frequent players would have more of a chance as opposed to being beamed in under a second on a map by a pro player and losing their entire kit. In effect, with full PvE, Marathon becomes an entirely different game (though that’s a longer conversation for another day).

This isn’t a point-and-laugh at Marathon’s numbers situation, it’s become a real issue for the game which could create a spiral that will be hard to extract from unless there is a magical surge of players or dramatic changes happen to alleviate this, and one of those may be PvE.

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