Destiny 2’s New All-Time Low Peak Playercount Hits Different This Time

This is not a huge surprise, given both the age of the game and the bleak prospect of an overlong season in the wake of an expansion delay, but yet again, Destiny 2 has hit a low water mark of peak players, with no indication of when there could be an upswing before The Final Shape itself. But now more than ever, this seems particularly worrisome given the state of the game and Bungie itself.

January 2024 had an average playercount on Steam of 39,011 and peak players of 58,769. This is in the wake of story content for the season ending, and a shift into essentially nothing but standard play, along with some overly grindy quests you can choose to complete each week for a couple rewards.

These figures are now lower than every previous month in Destiny history minus November 2022, when there were 38,158 average players and November 2023 when there were 33,486 average players. However, peak players have never been lower in a given month for as long as the game’s been on Steam.

The problem here is that this is happening at the worst possible time for Bungie. The game actually set all-time playercount records with the release of Lightfall in February of last year, meaning this isn’t purely an age thing, but player enthusiasm has tanked, as has morale at Bungie in the wake of brutal layoffs and continued leadership problems with no resolution in sight. Now, Destiny 2 is losing its game director, Joe Blackburn, next month.

But financially, we also learned that Bungie missed revenue targets by 45% this year, a situation so dire that leadership said that if Bungie had not been acquired by Sony, the company might have collapsed. Even now, there’s the possibility that Sony could step in and fully run Bungie if things don’t improve. And as we can see, things are not improving.

We are still four full months away from the launch of The Final Shape in June. I believe playercounts will continue to decline, and when that happens, so does revenue. Here, there is no 30th Anniversary pack for sale in the middle of the extended season, as the delay was too last minute for that. There’s something called “Into the Light” coming later, but as something that’s supposed to onboard new players before The Final Shape, I doubt they’re going to be able to charge for it. And a long season like this means no $10 sale, and likely not a full Eververse reset with new items, although they’ve already shown off a pricey Mass Effect collaboration they’ll be doing soon.

The hope is that things can escalate over time. Destiny went from 38K average players and a 60K peak in November of 2022 to 135K average players and 316K peak when Lightfall launched four months later. The hope is that The Final Shape will see a similarly massive surge, but I have my doubts, as the context of this year feels much different than last.

The Final Shape needs to be a hit and then players need to stick around for the episodic content to follow, and I’m curious to see if that raises or lowers playercounts when that kicks off. But with four months to go, I feel like this is going to get worse for a long while before it gets better.

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