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Marathon, Player Counts and Industry Anxiety | Unpacked (Patreon)

Published:
2026-04-03 15:04:19
Imported:
2026-04

Content

This week's episode of Unpacked is now available!

Files

Marathon, Player Counts and Industry Anxiety | Unpacked

The focus on player counts has been a big focus of games coverage for the past few years, but there's a deeper reason for that beyond those just doing it for clickbait. Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SecondWindGroup Second Wind Merch: https://shop.secondwindgroup.com/

Comments

SCP 3887B

Related, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on the news that the estimated cost for the device of GTA6 (based on a ton of rough estimated costs, not all directly for the actual game like work space rent) is potentially between $1-3 Billion? And if this is anywhere near accurate, what lessons all the other game companies might take based on how well GTA6 sells and how fast?

Jason Youngberg

Not sure if you heard, the online game store Robot Cache is shutting down in 30 days. Everything purchased will be inaccessible because they can't/won't separate their store page from the games people bought.

Pēteris Krišjānis

Lion share of GTAV costs was licensing, so I suspect same applies here. Considering GTA Online money printer, R* can take on it. Whatever it is good idea or does it make game actually better is different story.

scodiak

I wonder if this pressure of active player numbers will give a rise to single player or co-op games.

Ryallen

I'm surprised that Marathon is so popular but I think the much more surprising thing is that Marathon isn't something that just anyone can pick up and play. Most of the discourse surrounding the game is about how niche it is and how it commits to the hardcore crowd so effectively. I'm glad it made the call and was able to be as effective as it was, but if it fails I wonder if people will be willing to address how something like this is a gamble, that not everything that's good succeeds simply because the audience isn't large enough. But then again Sony's acquisition of Bungie might've been so expensive that the expectation for profit is far too high to allow for games that restrict their playerbase to this extent