Senior Overwatch dev says hating on Marathon is “unemployed, maidenless behaviour”

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A lead developer at Overwatch has dismissed concerns that its new mode, Marathon, is losing players, playfully criticizing those who are focusing on initial player counts.

Overwatch senior designer Dylan Snyder addressed concerns on X (formerly Twitter) on March 8th regarding reports that Bungie’s game had lost half its Steam players. This followed claims of negative reviews being posted on Metacritic, potentially impacting the game’s score.

Overwatch dev on Marathon player count debate

I was reading about Marathon, and apparently someone posted that they lost a huge chunk of their players – like, half of them! – over just one weekend. What’s really weird is that there wasn’t much else competing for players’ attention at the time, so it seemed really strange that so many left so quickly. Snyder actually responded to that post, which is pretty interesting.

Man, I was checking the stats, and it’s rough. We lost half our players over the weekend, and it’s not like we had huge competition! There was just one indie game and Pokopia launching alongside us, and they’re totally different genres. It’s really frustrating – we can’t even hold onto the players we do get, it seems.

Snyder questioned the claim, stating, “Is the 50% player drop in the room with us right now?”

Are we currently seeing half the players leave the game? You’re free to skip any game you’d like, but abandoning it like this seems a bit extreme…

— Dylan Snyder 💙 (@chronofloss) March 8, 2026

You’re welcome to skip any game you don’t enjoy, but acting like you have nothing better to do is a bit much,” he added.

In later responses, Snyder shared his frustration with judging a game’s success only by numbers from websites like SteamDB. He explained that, knowing the real player count for Overwatch, he finds it amusing when SteamDB data is presented as definitive proof of a game’s performance.

Ever since its release, people have been talking a lot about the performance of the game Marathon. This conversation has been made even louder by the fact that it came out on the same day as Slay the Spire 2, a popular game from a smaller developer. Slay the Spire 2 quickly gained a huge following, peaking at over 500,000 players at the same time, while Marathon reached around 88,000 concurrent players.

Slay the Spire 2 is currently only available on PC.

Players have been sharing data from SteamDB to try and understand how popular the game is, but it’s important to remember that SteamDB only shows player numbers on PC, not on consoles.

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2026-03-10 18:20