Destiny 2 players are jumping ship to play other games as the live-service shooter has hit an all-time low player count. The sci-fi game, or more the game’s developer Bungie has been through a rough past few weeks with unexpected layoffs hitting the firm. To make matters worse, Bungie forecast a 47% drop in revenue for its current fiscal year and confirmed that pre-orders for The Final Shape were lower than expected. The lowest we have seen in the Destiny 2 series to date.
Destiny 2 was released back in 2019 on Steam and has been one of the most popular daily played games since. However, over the past few weeks, its player count has been spiralling downwards with an all-time low player peak of 30,841.
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Granted, Destiny 2 always suffers from a slump in November. If you look back at previous years, November acted as downtime for the game. In 2022, this dropped down to 52k and in 2021 this was 64k. However, this year the numbers are much lower than in the past. As of 9 November, Destiny 2’s peak player count hit 40k, the lowest to date. That has since slumped down to 30k.
Destiny 2 relies on new seasonal content to draw players in. Each new season sees existing players return to the game. By the end weeks of that current season, these players dwindle down to a few thousand. However, this year is more concerning given the current state of Bungie and the future of Destiny 2 – the delayed expansion.
Bungie originally planned to launch Destiny 2: The Final Shape in February 2024. It would mark the end of the upcoming season and players would transition over to the new expansion. The expansion is now set to launch in June. This is a substantial delay which begs the question – what do players do in the meantime? We will likely see the Destiny 2 player count drop even more by March/April next year.
Sure, one can argue that 30k active players is still a “good” number but that isn’t the case. Destiny 2 is a mammoth game that costs a lot of money to run. It relies on hundreds of thousands of active players, new content to spend money on and microtransactions to drive the development of new content. The moment these players drop, the entire cycle is disrupted.
Source: Steam DB
