Oof, this is a bad one. While we only really ever have access to Steam data for most games, including Destiny 2, that’s changed with popularity.report/@richdestinyapp. Now, we have a granular look at the entire scope of Destiny, including the full history of the game and the console population as well. Or at least some approximation of it, and it certainly aligns with the past data we have had.
What seems to be happening is that the situation with Destiny 2 is as dire as it’s ever been since launch in 2017. What the data shows is that the current daily online players for Destiny post-Edge of Fate, post-Ash and Iron, is now well below the player population of even the infamous post-Curse of Osiris era, a poor expansion followed by a total player drop-off before the game had seasons to keep players entertained between releases.
Back then, in the spring of 2018, the low was somewhere around 350,000 daily players. Now, after a recent total crash after Ash and Iron, daily players are around 300,000 or less. That’s bad, but it’s also worth flashing back to a previous era when Bungie was talking about how alarming the post-Curse of Osiris drop-off was, via a presentation about the game:
“To show this visually, this was our weekly active users for Destiny 2 in the first few months and for comparison, this is what Destiny 1 looked like. So far so good!”
“But then this started happening. And this moment, right here – in February of 2018, was f***ing terrifying.”
“So this graph shows the trend of our Weekly Active Users. And at the rate we were shedding players, we did the math, and if this continued for 5 more weeks, our entire player population would be gone. We were, seriously, one month away from having to just close up shop on Destiny 2 altogether. So, like I said, that was late February of 2018.”
The point being, if Destiny 2 was about to close after that freefall, what does that mean for the current state of the game, which is now even below that? A caveat, however, is that Bungie was about double the size of what it is now back then, with far fewer people working on other projects like Marathon, if any. Plus, they would soon get support studios boosting development on top of that via Activision. Now, Destiny has maybe a half or a third of what they had back then, and if anything, Sony is taking devs away from them, rather than giving them more support. But costs are lower, at least.
That’s the only silver lining I can find, however. Destiny is two months away (and no doubt several more all-time lows) from the launch of its Star Wars-based expansion, Renegades. Even if it’s good, the current state of the game would suggest to me that I really don’t think it’s going to beat Edge of Fate’s numbers, which were already a third of The Final Shape’s numbers. Then, after that, another six months of relatively little content. That may be the ultimate “f***ing terrifying moment” this time around.
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