As the Marathon player count discourse reaches peak stupidity, Warframe and Overwatch devs speak up in solidarity: 'This is big unemployed, maidenless behavior'

Marathon has been surrounded by controversy since, well, its announcement. It's a new game in an established series from days gone by, revived as an extraction shooter (which wasn't quite so mainstream before Arc Raiders). Speaking of, it's also going against Embark's now-entrenched extraction shooter, despite both games actually playing very differently. Plus, it's also Bungie, which has had its fair share of issues over the years.Despite a fairly strong launch and the sentiment online from people who have played the game becoming more positive as time goes on (including many big streamers), people have been watching its Steam.db player count like a hawk. Using a crystal ball to call games you don't like dead is cool these days, I guess. Warframe's creative director, Rebecca Ford, and Overwatch's senior designer, Dylan Snyder, certainly don't think so.

Responding to a post claiming that Marathon lost 50% of its players (since the free Server Slam weekend, I assume) thanks to Slay the Spire 2 and Pokopia, Snyder says, "Feel free to dislike and pass up any game you want, more power to you, but this is big unemployed, maidenless behavior.""As someone who knows actual Overwatch player numbers, I tend to just laugh about SteamDB being used as a mic drop". Snyder raises a key issue with drawing sweeping conclusions from Steam player numbers: it's only one platform, and it only tracks concurrent players, not copies sold. In Overwatch's case, of course, it's also on Blizzard's own launcher, Battle.net, but the sentiment stands that you can't get a complete picture of a game's success from concurrent players on Steam.

Rebecca Ford speaks more to the dire state of the industry right now, explaining that when Warframe launched in 2013, there were only 435 games released on Steam that year to compete with. "Now games have 20,014 other games in the same year for many millions of Steam users that have already been exposed to 80,000+ prior releases they might have liked. We got incredibly lucky. We were broke."Of course, games like Arc Raiders and Helldivers can sneak up on us all and undoubtedly break through the sea of releases, but it gets harder and harder each time. That's even more true when you're trying to get a new live service game into the hands of players who already have multiple established ones to juggle.Nevertheless, Sony's not got the best track record for giving new live service games a lifeline, so only time will tell whether Marathon's met its expectations and has earned its backing for the long haul.