In the wake of the unceremonious death of Destiny 2 and layoffs encompassing nearly half of Bungie, all eyes are on the future of the studio, which is almost entirely leaning on Marathon n — its extraction shooter that launched this year. In Sony’s new earnings report, the company addressed Marathon and the state that it’s in. And Sony remains positive about the game.

There’s a singular line that Sony had about Marathon in its report, after citing other live service games like MLB The Show and Helldivers 2 as contributing “steadily to revenue.” That wasn’t said for Marathon , but rather:

“With the release of Season 2 in June, Marathon has maintained a high user retention rate while also acquiring new users.”

This has confused many gamers, as Marathon’s performance has been religiously tracked as almost a sort of sport online since its launch. And it would not seem as if the reality lines up with what Sony is saying here. Though there is only so much public-facing data we have.

The oft-cited Steam charts show that the launch of season 2 of Marathon spiked the game to 40,000 concurrent players on PC, where I can report that the game has a 2:1 ratio of players of PC versus console, so that is the majority. That 40,000 number was less than half of the 88,000 concurrents Marathon launched with, and in about two weeks, those figures were back down to around what they were before season 2 launched, around 10,000-11,000 a night.

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Since then, concurrents went down close to 5,000 before nearly tripling to 14,000 for the mid-season 2 update, which brought Marathon’s first full-on PvE mode. That lasted about a week until the numbers came back down again to close to that previous baseline. There is still more than a month left in the season.

I think this is a more traditional spin on the numbers. Concurrents are not all players, and Sony may be referring to a core group of players that have stuck with the game since the beginning, as it has very much engaged a select group. The problem, of course, is that group is very small. If Sony is saying that “high user retention” exists, then with these fluctuations and declines, we’re talking about a low floor of those who stick around.

As for acquiring new users, technically, that would be true if the game is selling any new copies at all, which it is to some degree. And acquiring new users does not mean that old users are not leaving, even if that aforementioned core group has remained. It is also noteworthy that the launch of Season 2 also was a free 10-day trial of the game, so that would obviously bring in new players to try out the game.

The overall point here is that Sony is publicly backing Marathon once again. It’s not reporting financial loss from the game in the report (that doesn’t mean there isn’t one), and there are no more Bungie impairment losses this time. It may be spin, but Sony is still talking about the game positively instead of, say, not mentioning it at all, which would be a bad sign.

Of note, Sony, of course, does not mention Destiny 2 at all, a game that saw an enormous player surge in the wake of its final update, which clearly has high user retention. Its current figures, even after declines, are likely 10x or more past what Marathon is doing, particularly with a higher console percentage, which we can’t see publicly, unlike on Steam.

As ever, this has intensely frustrated and angered Destiny players who find it hard to believe the game was killed, especially with this contrast with Marathon . Regardless of that comparison, it remains a stunning turn of events, and there has rarely been this severe of an ending for a storied ongoing franchise like this in gaming history, as plenty of other live games, despite playercount reductions, live on with new content additions to this day.

Marathon seems likely that it will get at least a year to prove itself in some capacity, though we do not know what metrics it must hit for Sony to be internally satisfied.

Marathon is currently undergoing a transformation, adding significant PvE content to its PvPvE extraction mode, with the promise of purely PvP content to follow. The idea appears to be to make the game with a number of spokes into different multiplayer genres, which, naturally, feels like a much smaller version of what Destiny was all these years. But so far, we have seen no indications of a turnaround, no matter what Sony is saying publicly.

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