Bungie’s newest FPS, Marathon, launched in early 2026 to wide acclaim, gaining a ‘Mostly Positive’ rating on Steam and a well-earned 8/10 from us in our review – but months after launch, the studio’s golden child, Destiny 2, is steamrolling (excuse the pun) the shooter in its concurrent player count.
Around the time of launch, FPS game Marathon hit an all-time peak of 77,358 players according to Steam Charts, with SteamDB citing it as 88,337. Comparatively, both cite Destiny 2’s Steam launch stats from 2019 – just shy of two years after release – as anywhere from around 292,000 to over 316,000. The now shuttered Highguard even punched slightly above Marathon’s total, capping out at over 97,000 on launch day according to SteamDB before quickly petering out (though Steam Charts has it listed at a much lower 13,115).
Fast forward to today, and despite Destiny 2 having future updates put on ice, it’s reaching 47,000 concurrent players compared to Marathon’s 2,800. That’s a difference of over ten times the number of gamers concurrently logging in.
Since Destiny launched its final update, Moment of Triumph, on Tuesday, June 9, its player count has consistently peaked at over 50,000 in any one day. Despite it consistently trending down since that date (which reached over 167,000), it’s still far and above anything Marathon has yet to attain since June began – hitting slightly over 40,000 following Season 2’s June 2 release.
While comparisons between the two games aren’t a 1:1, especially considering genre differences and no easily trackable data for how Destiny 2 performed on launch (though a 2017 report from gamesindustry.biz mentions “peak concurrent player counts over 1 million,”) it’s still a large enough gap between a game no longer receiving content updates and one due to receive its third season in September of this year.
Whether Marathon catches up to the long-term playerbase its sibling has garnered remains to be seen, but for now, Destiny 2 looks to be anything but riding off into the sunset.
