Ok, it's not just me thinking "800k sold, but struggling to break 50k active players" is weird?
I know I've bought a lot of shit on Steam that I've just never gotten around to playing, and that might just factor in hard here, but the funny option is that the numbers are true and they're just not including people who refunded on Steam after trying it.
Remember that there's a difference between the number of daily and concurrent players. Most people are only going to play for a couple of hours or so before hopping off (possibly sooner if a bad run really gets them down), so they're only going to factor into the concurrent count during that time. Other players cycle in as they leave, along with the expected dips for off-hours.
To my knowledge, Marathon does not have as permissive an API as Destiny does, so it might be harder for the community to scrape activity reports and confirm the number of daily players. But we can use D2 as a guide to see how accurate the numbers are.
According to
popularity.report, there were approximately 600k users who signed in and did anything the day Renegades launched, at the beginning of December.
Steam Charts shows a max concurrent at that time of about 70k. That gives a roughly tenfold increase between concurrent players and daily players. This roughly holds going down the line, though gradually shifting to a greater differential: beginning of January had 400k daily and 30k concurrent (13x), beginning of February had 250k daily and 15k concurrent (16x), and beginning of March had about 200k daily and 10k concurrent (20x). This does make sense in context, as people were playing longer when there was a lot of new things to do, but once that wore out its welcome, they started playing less, with most of the current userbase hopping on for a brief period to do a couple activities before signing off again. (I could go back and measure this against other points in the game's history, but I think this is a decent illustration. (Also I'm lazy.))
So if we were to apply the same "new game, new stuff to do, longer playtime" 10x ratio to Marathon's 40-50k concurrent peaks, we come up with maybe 400-500k per day, which is in line with the estimates. Again, there's no easy way to figure out what the real numbers are, but I'd say it's a close enough guess. What matters now is whether there's enough content there to keep that relatively small playerbase engaged, and if not, how quickly they can release more. A PVP-focused title does have an advantage in the fact that player interactions can keep things feeling fresh for longer, but it remains to be seen whether that'll be enough.
