Will Marathon Run on the Steam Machine? (verdict & ProtonDB Borked)
Bungie's Marathon on Valve's Steam Machine: our derived verdict is red at every setting — a SteamOS compatibility problem, not a power one. ProtonDB rates it Borked from 79 reports. What that means.
Short answer: no, not today. Marathon is out (our catalogue records a 2026 release), and our derived Steam Machine verdict is red at Low, Medium and High — because of SteamOS compatibility, not horsepower. ProtonDB rates it Borked from 79 community reports, and Valve flags it Unsupported on Steam Deck, which runs the same SteamOS as the Machine.
Full verdict card: Marathon on the Steam Machine — our derived Machine and Deck verdicts, ProtonDB's tier, controller support and spec fit, all in one place.
Before Marathon shipped, this page laid out two possible outcomes: if Bungie enabled Proton support for its anti-cheat, the Machine had the hardware to run it comfortably; if not, online play would be blocked regardless of the GPU. The signals since launch point to the second outcome.
Why the verdict is red — and why settings won't fix it
Our verdict is derived, not measured: we take Valve's own SteamOS/Deck compatibility signal for the game and run it through our published spec model. For Marathon that signal is Unsupported, so the model comes back red at every tier — the card's own note: a SteamOS compatibility issue, not a power problem.
| Setting tier | Our derived verdict |
|---|---|
| Low (1080p) | 🔴 Struggles — compatibility, not power |
| Medium (1080p) | 🔴 Struggles |
| High (1080p) | 🔴 Struggles |
The Machine's RX 7600-class GPU and Zen 4 CPU aren't what's in the way. A game that won't run under Proton doesn't get better at lower settings.
What ProtonDB's Borked tier means
Borked is ProtonDB's lowest tier: players report the game doesn't run under Proton. Seventy-nine reports with strong confidence behind the tier is a consistent community result, not a one-off. We show ProtonDB tiers verbatim and never turn them into frame-rate claims.
For online shooters, this pattern usually comes from anti-cheat that the developer hasn't enabled for Linux/Proton — there's no user-side workaround for a server-side block. We can't see Bungie's reasoning, so treat that as the common pattern, not a confirmed diagnosis for this game.
The other signals
- Controller: partial support (Steam-declared) — the game doesn't declare full controller support, so expect some menus or functions to want a mouse, even if compatibility changes.
- RAM: 16 GB recommended on Steam's own spec sheet — exactly the Machine's 16 GB, with no headroom to spare.
What would change the verdict
A compatibility change on Bungie's side. It would show up as ProtonDB reports moving off Borked and Valve's Deck status moving off Unsupported, and our verdict card follows Valve's signal automatically. Until then, don't buy a Steam Machine to play Marathon.
Frequently asked
Not at the moment. ProtonDB rates it Borked from 79 reports, Valve flags it Unsupported on Steam Deck, and our derived Steam Machine verdict is red at every setting tier as a result — a compatibility block, not a performance shortfall.
No. The red verdict comes from SteamOS compatibility, not from the hardware running out of power, so settings and upscaling don't get around it.
Yes — both run SteamOS and Proton with the same anti-cheat behaviour, so Valve's Deck rating is the best proxy we have. For Marathon it's Unsupported, which is exactly the warning sign this page flagged before launch.
Because we hold no measured Steam Machine FPS for Marathon, and we don't publish figures we didn't measure. The verdict is derived from Valve's compatibility signal plus our spec model; the 79 ProtonDB reports are real community data about whether it runs at all — see our methodology.