One page that separates what is actually confirmed about Marathon from what is rumor: official Bungie posts, press reports, and community chatter, every item tiered by credibility, cross-referenced, and link-checked. Updated automatically every day.
The short version. Vault Breaker shipped on July 21, 2026 with Update 1.1.5, giving Marathon its first real PvE mode. It roughly 2.2x the player count on day one, peaking at 14,809 concurrent. The bump is gone. The population is now 10% below where it sat the week before launch. Everything below is either sourced to Bungie or measured directly.
In the week before launch, Marathon's daily peak topped out around 6,775. On launch day it hit 14,809. The most recent complete day peaked at 6,081, giving back about 59% of the launch spike.
The bump is gone. The population is now 10% below where it sat the week before launch. Use the range buttons above to switch between the launch week and the full history since March. Every point is a daily peak concurrent count from Steam, the same measure SteamDB publishes, so it is checkable against a public source.
Vault Breaker drops you into Cryo Archive, Marathon's endgame map, with no other players hunting you. You take on a progressively harder series of vaults, solo, in a duo, or as a full crew, and grow stronger across multiple runs through progression built specifically for the mode.
The defining rule is that your loot stays behind. Instead of extracting gear, successful runs bank Vault Data, a mode-specific currency you spend on Vault Breaker Sponsored Kits or on equipment usable in Marathon's other modes. That keeps the game's richest zone from flooding the main economy while still making PvE runs matter.
The same update shipped the first iteration of Cradle Evolution: fully level your Cradle, then reset it for one additional maximum Energy point and unique cosmetics, including Runner shell styles.
Bungie has described Vault Breaker as experimental, and has not stated plainly whether it stays in the game permanently. Reporting points to a permanent PvE mode arriving with Season 3 on September 22, which implies Vault Breaker is the trial run rather than the finished feature, but that framing comes from aggregated coverage rather than a direct Bungie statement, so treat it as unconfirmed.
Also unresolved: whether the mode's difficulty lands where Bungie wants it. Community feedback has pulled in both directions, early reports that the vaults were punishing and later ones that the AI is undertuned. Nothing about long-term retention can be called yet; that is what the chart above is for, and it updates every day.
When any of this is confirmed, it appears in the daily digest automatically.