‘Destiny 2’ Fans Debate Allegedly Poor ‘Final Shape’ Preorders

A new article is circulating around the Destiny 2 community by Zuhaad Ali of Destiny Bulletin, claiming that The Final Shape’s pre-orders are dismally low compared to past expansions.

It’s a lengthy article with a lot of math, but the methodology at its core feels like something that’s premature analysis and probably should not be given all that much weight as an accurate metric of the fate of Destiny 2’s expansion.

The idea here was to use playerbase data-hoarding Charlemagnebot to see how many players had the emblem associated with Final Shape preorders. The result was that the examination found that those with the emblem were currently less than a quarter of Lightfall’s alleged preorders (again, using its emblems as a metric) and 13% of Beyond Light’s, which allegedly has the largest amount of pre-orders.

The narrative being painted here is that Bungie’s most important expansion has incredibly low preorders and it is unlikely that numbers dramatically increase before launch given that the big Final Shape reveal already took place. I have…many issues with this entire thing, and again, I don’t know how much weight could be given to it.

• This time around, the pre-order emblem is claimed from the Rewards kiosk, rather than Rahool, and it must be claimed in order to show up in collections. Given the new method of distribution, this may dramatically alter the figures of who has the emblem in collections for tracking and who doesn’t.
• Bungie announced a million pre-orders for The Witch Queen just a few weeks before it launched, and it is the case that pre-orders can accelerate dramatically as the expansion gets closer, as players who know they’re going to buy it anyway may do so a touch early to still get its rewards. There’s often not necessary that much motivation to get it six months early.
• I’m not sure these numbers make tons of sense, and we don’t have hard sales data for any of these expansions. The emblem idea shows that Beyond Light has 3.1 million preorders and Lightfall has 2.2 million, a large drop. But Lightfall ended up producing the most concurrent players Destiny had in Steam history, implying the eventual sales disparity should not have been that significant.

Of course, outside of the emblem idea, there are certainly logical points that may indicate lower Final Shape preorders.

• As part of reporting about Bungie’s recent layoffs, one of the reveals was that in addition to revenue misses this past year, Final Shape preorders were lower than Bungie wanted them to be.
• Then, even if The Final Shape is Destiny’s final Light and Darkness expansion, the past year of Destiny 2 has been rather devastating in morale and playercount in the wake of the disappointment of Lightfall, and that could depress sales of the next expansion.
• There’s also simply a growing amount of competition in the live service space with each new year, and Destiny simply continues to age, leading to more natural declines on top of everything else.

It does certainly seem possible that The Final Shape pre-orders and sales could end up lower than Bungie wants. But that’s something you could guess at without this emblem-based analysis, and it feels like there are just too many potential caveats and unknowns to make this idea that pre-orders are this level of terrible a confirmed reality. I get what he was trying to do, but I don’t think this can be taken as anything close to fact.

Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.