At the moment, there’s a big debate surrounding Marathon versus Arc Raiders, which was always going to happen since the two share the same genre. They’re both huge, open extraction shooters, released just a few months apart from each other, and when Marathon confidently stated that it wouldn’t give cheaters a second chance, many saw that as a dig at Arc Raiders giving cheaters three chances before getting permanently banned from the game. It’s natural that a semi-rivalry would start brewing.
Of course, Marathon has now been released, and the expected discussions surrounding player counts have started. Unfortunately for those in Marathon’s corner, it hasn’t come anywhere near matching the numbers that Arc Raiders posted upon its release, amassing an admittedly impressive player count of 88,337 a day after release. It’s good, but it’s not Slay the Spire 2 good.
Marathon’s Release Has Barely Affected Arc Raiders On PC
More interestingly, though, is the impact that Marathon has actually had on the Arc Raiders player base, or rather, the complete lack of it. You’d have thought that since both Marathon and Arc Raiders share the same genre, they’d also share the same audience, and that the player numbers for Arc Raiders on PC would dip slightly, just out of sheer curiosity more than anything.
However, Arc Raiders appears to be completely unaffected by Marathon’s launch. On the day of release, Marathon posted player numbers of 86,718 on PC, according to SteamDB. Head on over to the Arc Raiders SteamDB page, and you’ll see that the game posted a daily peak player count of 192,003, which is the lowest of the week so far, but it’s worth noting that it posted a daily peak player count of 192,810 last Friday, which is only slightly higher.
It’s definitely a lot higher than you’d expect, suggesting that Arc Raiders and Marathon have managed to attract different audiences despite being in the same genre. Of course, SteamDB is only one platform, and it’s possible that Marathon might have a bigger playerbase on PlayStation, given it’s a Sony published game, but these things are usually correlative more often than not.
In any case, it’s nice to see that two games in the same genre can flourish at the same time, and if you’re a fan of extraction shooters in general, then you must be having a whale of a time at the moment. We’ll have to see if Marathon can kick on as well as Arc Raiders has, and whether the weekend will have any kind of impact on the player numbers of either game.
- Released
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March 5, 2026
- ESRB
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Teen / Animated Blood, Language, Violence, In-Game Purchases, Users Interact
- Multiplayer
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Online Multiplayer, Online Co-Op
