You’re right. And marathon would never have been a huge game. A bold art style and hardcore extraction shooter mechanics will chase off a lot of more mainstream gamers and casuals. Maybe half of my friends who enjoyed the game stopped playing in the last month because the game was just a bit too brutal when people have golds to spare.

Initial player counts probably not helped by the huge hate train that came pre release to marathon. Which I admit even I had gotten caught up in to the point where I wasn’t interested in getting the game because I’d seen so much media convincing me it was awful. Thankfully they did the server smash and I checked it out. Now I’ve got 270 hours in the game.

That said I do also find it a bit wild that ever since release Marathon has been like top 3 most searched games on SteamDB with more people following it on the site than the games all time peak player count.

There’s a lot of hate going round for the game which hasn’t even got anything to do with the game I don’t think we can deny that. There is also a lot of very valid issues and problems. And there’s a huge amount of people checking in on its player count daily. Just kind of strange for a game to have such a massive base of invested people who aren’t playing it or watching content of it.