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Marathon approaching 15k CCU low (sponsored by coachmcguirk91 - still having a blast)

Today Destiny 2 will probably be ahead of Marathon...i really wonder what kind of conversations are going on inside Bungie right now. Even better...inside Playstation.
Vince Mcmahon GIF
 
I mean, all this progressive mindset destroyed everything we had between game devs and consumers.

Gamers used to raise their voice about things they don't like, send feedback and devs listen to most of the conversation surround this.

Now with all those toxic positivity, gamers raising their voices is violence, sending feedback is useless, youtubers complaining about the game become grifters.

I don't remember the last time I talked face to face with a game dev. I guess was from Xbox 360 era. Trying to make the game better, sending bugs and glitchs.

Now you either enter into a Discord closed room, create a support ticket, get ignored, shadowban, get answer to an automatic bot...

I guess that what end up making Destiny 2 a shit. They start to use those modern tools to make their life better, but end up destroying every sight of connection they have with their audience.
I don't even watch Youtube that much anymore because of the censorship, AI, shitty algorithms, etc, but I'm so fucking sick of anyone not mindlessly kissing the developer's asses is called a "gRiFtEr". I'm at the point that if anyone uses that term unironically as an insult or criticism, I question their overall intelligence.
 
On Gemini I asked how player distro was for D2:
Destiny 2 has a larger overall player base on console (PlayStation/Xbox) compared to PC, though crossplay merges these pools. While console generally has higher total numbers, PC boasts a very active, competitive population with significant representation through Steam and Epic. PC lobbies are often perceived as faster-paced.
Key Population Insights (as of early 2026):
  • Console Strength: Reddit discussions and community analytics suggest console (PlayStation in particular) still acts as the primary home for the majority of the player base.
If that's true, then it is possible that D2 has already been ahead of Marathon.
 
I don't even watch Youtube that much anymore because of the censorship, AI, shitty algorithms, etc, but I'm so fucking sick of anyone not mindlessly kissing the developer's asses is called a "gRiFtEr". I'm at the point that if anyone uses that term unironically as an insult or criticism, I question their overall intelligence.

I mean, Angryjoe is the most progressive boot licking of all the youtubers, and still he got called a grifter (when he was doing Suicide Squad videos), so this pretty much end up being just an easy way of game devs to ignore criticism.
 
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Are you using 'session' to mean the average user's total play time in the day?
Yes. I didn't want to get too complex with the formula.

Basically it sums the CCU for each hour (so we're not just looking at the peak), and then divides by the session length, with the session length being a assumption of total daily play time for a single player. This is why I produce it as a range and expose these values as tweakables directly in the extension. I could certainly put in things like weekend bumps when looking to build an overall graph of DAU, but for now a user could just make that adjustment in the panel when it's the weekend.

My goal was just to get the framework up and running yesterday then I'd think more on building a stronger formula. I did a quick search but saw most DAU calculations to be based on mobile games, which I don't think are applicable here because player behavior is so different.
 
Hey Gemini, "make a formula for me. Let's say we have 2 games, Marathon and Destiny 2. Marathon has 70% of playerbase on PC and D2 has 60% of playerbase on console. Marathon currently has 18,402 peak player count on PC and D2 currently has 12,923 peak player count. Make a formula and show your work to determine which game is currently more popular."
GameEstimated Total Peak Players
Marathon26,289
Destiny 221,538
Conclusion: Based on these metrics, Marathon is currently more popular, with an estimated total peak player base that is approximately 22% larger than Destiny 2's.
puppet GIF

PS: It didn't display perfectly when pasted so I only posted the solution above however if you put that quoted prompt into free gemini it will show you the math.

Edit: I was wrong, I prompted incorrectly, here is the correct prompt: "make a formula for me. Let's say we have 2 games, Marathon and Destiny 2. Marathon has 70% of playerbase on PC and D2 has 60% of playerbase on console. Marathon currently has 18,402 peak player count on PC and D2 currently has 12,923 peak player count on PC. Make a formula and show your work to determine which game is currently more popular." you will notice a small tweak produced more accurate figures:

Comparison & Conclusion


GamePC PeakTotal Estimated Peak
Marathon18,40226,289
Destiny 212,92332,308
Conclusion: Even though Marathon has a higher peak player count on PC, Destiny 2 is currently more popular overall. This is because Destiny 2's PC players represent a smaller slice of its total pie compared to Marathon, indicating a much larger console audience for Destiny 2.
Cat Smile GIF

The math is very simple. If 70% of marathon players are on PC, then just say yesterday's peak 18,402, divided by 70, then times 100.
Next say 60% of D2 players are on console.(a guess) then you say 12,923 divided by 40, then times 100. The more heavily D2 skews towards console the worse it looks for Marathon. The general consensus is that D2 leans slightly more console and Marathon leans heavily pc.
 
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I mean, Angryjoe is the most progressive boot licking of all the youtubers, and still he got called a grifter (when he was doing Suicide Squad videos), so this pretty much end up being just an easy way of game devs to ignore criticism.
Exactly my point. The word has no fucking meaning now whatsoever, just like other equally dumb buzzwords like incel, gooner, and chud.
 
Or Woke, DEI, etc.
Not really, but nice try. Western developers literally brag about how "progressive" their shitty games are on social media. Microsoft literally starts presentations with people stating their gender, Sony has done nothing with their IPs but do the lame male to female main characters to placate feminists when it has nothing to do with making games more fun, and both of these companies literally have DEI initiatives in official documents. Your little "both sides" shit doesn't work anymore buddy.
 
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Stuff like this always shows how simple minded a lot of gamers are.

The changes aren't meant to eliminate early fights, but to reduce the rates of early fights.

Excuse Me What GIF


I feel like we didn't watch the same clip. They were spawned in an open field and got picked off by snipers before they had a chance to even get to any building, probably using that bullshit thermal scope. Short of preemptively using stealth abilities what were they supposed to do here?

This feels like it would be a massive design failure in a normal game, nevermind an extraction shooter where you lose all your gear.
 
Excuse Me What GIF


I feel like we didn't watch the same clip. They were spawned in an open field and got picked off by snipers before they had a chance to even get to any building, probably using that bullshit thermal scope. Short of preemptively using stealth abilities what were they supposed to do here?

This feels like it would be a massive design failure in a normal game, nevermind an extraction shooter where you lose all your gear.

This is why people go nuts when reviewers don't finish games. You haven't played Marathon, so you know very little about what's going on in that clip.

They spawned facing the nearest PoI and they spawned in the most wide open, dangerous part of the map. Instead of running towards relative safety, they opted to take an early right turn and risk getting caught in the open.

You do develop game sense after a while. Dire Marsh is a map dominated by snipers. The fog on the map means thermals are more valued there. Marathon is very much a game in which you play to your weapons effective range.

This is poker with guns being commented on by people who don't play poker.
 
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So by May 13th, a couple weeks, I think we may be approaching the 10k peak ccu figure based off predictions in this thread and elsewhere. It will drop slower after that since we are talking fractions of a small number but the biggest group of players left to shed will be gone in 2 weeks. Then it will be attrition until the next season. Reddit has tried their hand at a stabilization model:



It's showing stabilization at 10k peak ccu.(note they seem to think the game will retain players do better than I do and give it more time to reach 10k but nevertheless they think that's where it's headed)

Season 2 will probably be set in stone but at this point they need to do a big change to retain people. If S2 starts a similar or worse bleed after the bump we'll have nothing to talk about anymore, lol.
 
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You do develop game sense after a while. Dire Marsh is a map dominated by snipers. The fog on the map means thermals are more valued there. Marathon is very much a game in which you play to your weapons effective range.

This is poker with guns being commented on by people who don't play poker.
So everybody spawns with thermal snipers in their load out?
 
So everybody spawns with thermal snipers in their load out?

Two of the players in that clip have white shields, likely free kits or very under geared. They got popped within 20 seconds of the match start and the situation just reads like they got ganked by a team that knew the nearby spawn points and rushed them down.

People will always make up bullshit about tactics to defend bad design. If they had just turned left instead of right, they wouldn't have died so it's balanced see? They're just playing captain hindsight with information no one had at the time. It was 20 seconds into the match, no one had time to get to cover, no one had time to recon anything. There was no guarantee the building / POI in front of them wasn't also hot, they had to blindly make a push to a zone.

No reasonable player is going to look at that clip and think the game is in an ok place or that they want to experience that.
 
Not really, but nice try. Western developers literally brag about how "progressive" their shitty games are on social media. Microsoft literally starts presentations with people stating their gender, Sony has done nothing with their IPs but do the lame male to female main characters to placate feminists when it has nothing to do with making games more fun, and both of these companies literally have DEI initiatives in official documents. Your little "both sides" shit doesn't work anymore buddy.

Yes really. Those words almost mean nothing now, because people have over used them. People like yourself see the entire world through the lens on DEI and Woke. It's retarded. And yes grifters, Incel, and Gooners do exist. If you don't think they do, then maybe ask yourself why you believe only one side exist, but not the other.
 
Receipts of how far down the DEI rabbit hole MS has fallen. Their intro from 5:10 to 6:05 is pure fucking cancer. Motherfuckers still playing stupid thinking wokeness/DEI is made up.



That was one minute of crazy LOL!!!!! Almost seem like an SNL skit.
 
Receipts of how far down the DEI rabbit hole MS has fallen. Their intro from 5:10 to 6:05 is pure fucking cancer. Motherfuckers still playing stupid thinking wokeness/DEI is made up.


I knew exactly what clip this was going to be before I pressed play. That video is peak grotesque virtue signalling of the absolute worst kind.

I remember going to a conference about that time and there was this gem of a moment where we're all sat in the warmth of this fancy building, there's drinks and canapes being handed out and the speaker on stage does the same land acknowledgement, going on about how the building and area were once the land occupied by x, y, z. In my boredom I looked out of the window to see one of these native peoples out in the cold going through a trashbin looking for scraps of food.

As long as you do the dance you can sleep happy at night on a full stomach of free snacks knowing you signaled that virtue real hard today.
 
Receipts of how far down the DEI rabbit hole MS has fallen. Their intro from 5:10 to 6:05 is pure fucking cancer. Motherfuckers still playing stupid thinking wokeness/DEI is made up.

Hey, i all but approve MS demolishing their headquarters and giving the land back to the simemish or mumamidh or whoever.
 
The fact that it is still bleeding cannot mathematically be considered a coincidence any longer and instead is evidence of a non-virtuous cycle, aka viscious cycle, aka neagivtive feedback loop. I posted a pdf from activision describing this exact situation way earlier in the thread(which was their justification for sbmm, too late to do that for marathon).

This vicious cycle is aided by cheaters and creates a negative feedback loop that causes players to abandon the game. As the worst players abandon the game the next skill level moves into the batters box and it keeps going. I don't agree with reddit. I think the floor is 5k not 10k.

The community has not helped, reinforcing the idea of players leaving if they are having a bad time. Saying "not all games are for everyone and that's okay, you should quit" ect did not help those who were on the fence decide to stick it out.

Marathon is type 2 fun which is rather niche for gaming anyway: Type 2 fun refers to activities that are miserable, stressful, or painful while happening, but become enjoyable, rewarding, and memorable in retrospect. That is gonna limit session length as well. I bet session length nosedived in this game as it became harder due to viscous cycle. They need a 2.0 already, aka they launched with the wrong game.
 
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I don't even watch Youtube that much anymore because of the censorship, AI, shitty algorithms, etc, but I'm so fucking sick of anyone not mindlessly kissing the developer's asses is called a "gRiFtEr". I'm at the point that if anyone uses that term unironically as an insult or criticism, I question their overall intelligence.
Grifter is an easy why to spot a hardcore leftist retard who has zero actual arguments.
 
So by May 13th, a couple weeks, I think we may be approaching the 10k peak ccu figure based off predictions in this thread and elsewhere. It will drop slower after that since we are talking fractions of a small number but the biggest group of players left to shed will be gone in 2 weeks. Then it will be attrition until the next season. Reddit has tried their hand at a stabilization model:



It's showing stabilization at 10k peak ccu.(note they seem to think the game will retain players do better than I do and give it more time to reach 10k but nevertheless they think that's where it's headed)

Season 2 will probably be set in stone but at this point they need to do a big change to retain people. If S2 starts a similar or worse bleed after the bump we'll have nothing to talk about anymore, lol.


I see they note in the comments that they're extracting the data from SteamDB CSV export and part of the issue there is it only outputs daily peaks, even though when you look at the graph you can see the hourly data including the troughs. That's why I worked on the browser extension yesterday so I could tap into the total data. Peaks don't really say much. You could have a game that sits at zero players for 23 hours and then for 1 hour gets 100k players. It would look way better when just observing daily peak than a game that has a sustained 50k players for the entire day, but in reality the 50k peak player game is in a much healthier state.
 
I see they note in the comments that they're extracting the data from SteamDB CSV export and part of the issue there is it only outputs daily peaks, even though when you look at the graph you can see the hourly data including the troughs. That's why I worked on the browser extension yesterday so I could tap into the total data. Peaks don't really say much. You could have a game that sits at zero players for 23 hours and then for 1 hour gets 100k players. It would look way better when just observing daily peak than a game that has a sustained 50k players for the entire day, but in reality the 50k peak player game is in a much healthier state.
hehe, truth be told I fully expected our numbers to be better than anything they did on reddit.

They have fought this on reddit since day 1. Now they are trying to come in and steal the ccu thunder because they see all the non-reddit forums have super hot threads about the ccu. They are trying to take our eyes but they don't have the data knowhow to keep up because they have been out of the loop with their heads in the sand.
 
It's the truth. I have never seen a functioning member of society use the word grifter.

You need to speak to more functioning humans then. Grifters are all over the place. Especially since Covid started and more people "turned into" Youtubers. Even if you dislike the word (which would be odd), you'd 100% have to accept that there are people online that benefit financially by deceiving people through scams, lies, manipulation, and false information.....right?

Surely you agree that people routinely game\exploit social media algorithms to make money and boost their digital visibility.
 
You need to speak to more functioning humans then. Grifters are all over the place. Especially since Covid started and more people "turned into" Youtubers. Even if you dislike the word (which would be odd), you'd 100% have to accept that there are people online that benefit financially by deceiving people through scams, lies, manipulation, and false information.....right?

Surely you agree that people routinely game\exploit social media algorithms to make money and boost their digital visibility.
Then everyone is a grifter if you want us to use your definition. And if everyone is a grifter, then the meaning of "grifter" holds little weight.

And this is what you're passionate about in a thread about the CCU count of a GAAS game?
 
Then everyone is a grifter if you want us to use your definition. And if everyone is a grifter, then the meaning of "grifter" holds little weight.

And this is what you're passionate about in a thread about the CCU count of a GAAS game?

No, everybody doesn't do that on the internet. And you know this. Some have perfected the misdirection and lying in order to trick the masses to hate someone or something (and then they get PAID through clicks). Plus I was responding to someone else in this thread. Look up, you'll see.
 
No, everybody doesn't do that on the internet. And you know this. Some have perfected the misdirection and lying in order to trick the masses to hate someone or something (and then they get PAID through clicks). Plus I was responding to someone else in this thread. Look up, you'll see.
There you go taking "everybody" too literally. Arbitrarily settling on a definition to label too wide of a swath of people as "grifters" invalidates the meaning of the word. And on top of that, you immediately assume ill intent which means you use the term in bad faith.

So nah, don't believe you one sec unless you can prove intentional misdirection and lying beyond reasonable doubt.
 
Yes really. Those words almost mean nothing now, because people have over used them. People like yourself see the entire world through the lens on DEI and Woke. It's retarded. And yes grifters, Incel, and Gooners do exist. If you don't think they do, then maybe ask yourself why you believe only one side exist, but not the other.
Imagine being an adult and using idiotic meme words like gooner or incel. At that point, I'd have more respect for you if you just called people boogerface or poopoo head. You genuinely sound intellectually stunted using words like those.

Do you even know what the original definition of a goon is? Hint: it has nothing to do with masturbation or sex. I'll see if you're smart enough to give me the real definition of goon.

Incel is just a moron's replacement for virgin.

I also like how you didn't refute mine or anyone else's receipts of these companies adopting leftist ideology in their practices, games, or overall shift in attitude so at least you've stopped playing stupid in that regard for now.
 
I think I absolutely agree with that it. All they do is label anyone that disagrees with them

What they do is keep inventing new derogatory terms to label people they don't like or disagree with. Problem is that aways backfire at them (incels can also being used on women, chuds being adopted by people for fun instead, etc).
 
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Imagine being an adult and using idiotic meme words like gooner or incel. At that point, I'd have more respect for you if you just called people boogerface or poopoo head. You genuinely sound intellectually stunted using words like those.

Do you even know what the original definition of a goon is? Hint: it has nothing to do with masturbation or sex. I'll see if you're smart enough to give me the real definition of goon.

Incel is just a moron's replacement for virgin.

I also like how you didn't refute mine or anyone else's receipts of these companies adopting leftist ideology in their practices, games, or overall shift in attitude so at least you've stopped playing stupid in that regard for now.

I'm surprised these words really make you upset. Like you say, "Incel is just a moron's replacement for virgin." First of all that's not actually true. But even if it was, why does that replacement word have to come from a moron? And I'm not here to defend or refute that some of those companies adopted those so-called leftist practices. That's obvious. They 100% did so. It's equally as obvious that grifters, incels, and gooners exist and have ruin many culture conversations within the gaming community.

Some of us even believe they've made the gaming culture worse. This isn't some crazy, out of left field type thinking. Many of us have seen the decline of video game conversations in general over the last 5-6 years. You can even see it on GAF.
 
I'm surprised these words really make you upset. Like you say, "Incel is just a moron's replacement for virgin." First of all that's not actually true. But even if it was, why does that replacement word have to come from a moron? And I'm not here to defend or refute that some of those companies adopted those so-called leftist practices. That's obvious. They 100% did so. It's equally as obvious that grifters, incels, and gooners exist and have ruin many culture conversations within the gaming community.

Some of us even believe they've made the gaming culture worse. This isn't some crazy, out of left field type thinking. Many of us have seen the decline of video game conversations in general over the last 5-6 years. You can even see it on GAF.
Your argument completely ignores how all of this started, we were just nerds quietly enjoying a hobby. Anything that came after Feminist Frequency is a symptom not the cause.

Vicious gatekeeping is the only path back to normalcy.
 
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