"It's a marathon, not a race," is the old saying to get across that sometimes success comes slowly. Bungie's Marathon is ignoring its namesake and sprinting across the starting line as Steam's best-selling new game.
The storied studio behind Halo and Destiny is prepping to launch its first-ever extraction shooter in mere hours, and it's already poised quite nicely for success. Marathon's pre-order currently sits at second place on Steam's Top Sellers chart that ranks games based on revenue generated. Entirely fuelled by microtransactions, Counter-Strike 2 is the only game above it, but as far as premium game sales go, Marathon is effectively on top and has dethroned Resident Evil Requiem's week-long reign.
What makes the feat doubly impressive is that Marathon's standard edition retails for $40/£35 (a deluxe edition will set you back $60/£50), so the FPS would need to sell more copies to keep up with its full-priced peers on the list.
The last time Steam updated the chart a week ago, Marathon was actually 80 places behind. A huge jump no matter how you look at it, and it's a good indication that Marathon's free server slam worked its magic to convince enough people to stick around and whip their wallets out.
Marathon's open playtests did garner a fair share of criticism, with lots of complaints aimed at the shooter's messy UI and headache-inducing fonts (emphasis on the plural there). Bungie's UI designer Elliot Gray took note of the divisive menus, but was also pretty adamant that the team don't want to "remove the SAUCE from the UI." Here's hoping Marathon's full launch keeps up the momentum.
If you're planning to jump into the shooter at launch, be sure to check out our Marathon release time guide to see when you can gain access in your region on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.
Here's how to pre-install Marathon and get ready for launch, and our guide to all Marathon characters, ranked.
