Look, it's been a busy week on Steam. Bungie's Marathon landed with respectable numbers on 5 March, pulling in 88,000 concurrent players at peak. The extraction shooter marked Bungie's first major release under Sony Interactive Entertainment ownership, and the studio had clearly invested heavily in the production side of things. But the real story of the day didn't involve space marines scavenging alien colonies.
Slay the Spire 2 reached 179,456 players during its Steam Early Access launch, setting a new record for roguelike games. A deckbuilder from an indie studio called Mega Crit absolutely dwarfed Marathon's numbers, peaking at more than double what the big-budget shooter managed. Within hours,Slay the Spire 2 released in early access and immediately shot to the top of Steam's top sellers list, above Marathon. Here's the thing: neither game is a bad performer by any reasonable standard, but the contrast tells you something interesting about what players actually want.
Fair dinkum, though, the real talking point has been comparing Marathon's approach to character voice acting against Arc Raiders, the extraction shooter that's been quietly dominating Valve's charts for months.Arc Raiders is undeniably a one-of-a-kind extraction shooter, finally bringing the niche, hardcore genre to the masses. And while its retro-futuristic aesthetic, reminiscent of Fallout, is a joy to wage war in or make life-long friends in, the same can't be said for its cast of quest givers.
According to PC Gamer,Arc Raiders characters are puppets pretending to be human, a problem only worsened by the deadpan line delivery of their text-to-speech, AI-powered voices.Arc Raiders uses text-to-speech models trained on recordings of real voice actors. Embark claims this allows it to implement new dialogue quickly, creating voice lines in hours instead of scheduling recording sessions and rehiring performers.
Marathon took the opposite road.In January 2026, Bungie announced the game's voice cast, which includes Roger Clark, Elias Toufexis, Ben Starr, Jennifer English, Neil Newbon, Nika Futterman, Rich Keeble, Erica Lindbeck, and Erin Yvette. The studio's faction reps and other recurring NPCs benefit from genuine human performances, and it shows.Good voice acting takes talent, and it comes across in Marathon's faction reps, playable characters, and other tidbits.
You've got to hand it to Bungie for that commitment. It's not just about audio quality, though Marathon clearly wins that round. It's about world building. A character with personality, even a minor NPC, makes a game world feel lived-in rather than procedurally generated. Arc Raiders' functional approach saves money and time, but at a genuine creative cost.
That said, Embark's perspective isn't entirely without merit.Executives see AI as a cost-cutting measure that maintains or improves output while reducing human labour costs. They do not see the value of the art or the artists in the margins. It's a pragmatic calculation, even if it rankles.
Here's where the industry stands: Marathon's big-budget approach proves that vocal talent still registers with players, at least at the level where it matters for character connection. Arc Raiders proves that decent gameplay can carry a title even when the voice work is... less inspired. Both are successful. But Bungie's willingness to invest in character performance suggests that when players have the choice, they notice the difference. Slay the Spire 2's meteoric rise, meanwhile, reminds us that exceptional game design will always find an audience, regardless of production bells and whistles. The real win, perhaps, is that players actually care about the craft on both sides of the screen.