Destiny 2's low player count is the symptom of deeper problems

Destiny 2: The Final Shape was supposed to launch on February 28, 2024. We’ve just passed that momentous date and are staring down the barrel of three more months of Season of the Wish until we arrive at the new release date of June 4. What should have been the last hurrah in the Light and Darkness Saga is now just another date, though it is one now marred by another scar: it marks a day where the Steam Destiny 2 player count is down to its lowest point in years.

A quick look at SteamCharts paints a grim picture, though it’s one players might be used to in the lead up to a new expansion. The 24-hour peak player count on Steam was a little over 31,000 on February 29, 2024. This number has been steadily dropping since Lightfall broke the concurrent player count record for Destiny 2 with some 316,000 players logging in.

While it’s not unusual for Destiny 2 numbers to wane in the final season of an expansion, Season of the Wish’s numbers are far lower than that of previous seasons that led into a new expansion. Season of the Lost (Destiny 2’s now second-longest season) still maintained a player count higher than 75,000 while Season of the Seraph never dipped lower than 96,000.

All of this is in the face of Bungie’s efforts to generate some positivity about the game with upcoming patches. Over the last few weeks, Bungie has been detailing various changes to the core sandbox experience that players can expect to arrive in March, May as well as when The Final Shape launches. Things like a Crucible overhaul, character customization, new weapons to farm, and ability buffs are just a couple of the tweaks the developers are deploying to try and fix problems and make the game feel fresher.

So what’s the problem and why is Season of the Wish struggling to retain players when previous last-in-line seasons haven’t seen this precipitous fall in player count? For starters, there’s the statistical element of this: A higher concurrent player count means more players to lose. But the problem is deeper than pure numbers; it’s likely a myriad of factors including player burnout, public perception of Bungie, and the release of several excellent games.

The Destiny 2 playerbase has been experiencing the same type of seasonal content for years now. The formula has become predictable and in turn stale. Players know that the story will unfold over several weeks, with each weekly quest involving playing the new seasonal activity, running between characters and video calls, only to be told to “wait until next week”. At about the halfway point, they’ll see a cutscene that will flip the narrative on its head or offer a new perspective of someone they thought as their enemy. It’s trite and pales in comparison to the dizzying heights of the narrative experienced in The Witch Queen campaign.

Beyond the story, players are also stuffed to the gills with weapons and armor. Love it or hate it, weapon crafting has fundamentally upset the bedrock of the loot chase in Destiny 2. There are some outlier weapons worth farming but for the most part players can get god-tier weapons for endgame content by simply crafting them. Any new weapon Bungie adds to the game has to push the needle further than it currently is, though this is unlikely given the company’s avoidance of power creep.

So now you’ve got a playerbase that can predict the story – broadly speaking – but also has all the weapons they’ll ever need to combat the hardest content in the game. Why bother farming for a Cold Comfort god roll when you can easily make an Apex Predator that’ll do almost as well? Unless Bungie leans harder into the challenge and the slight difference in damage output between the two matters, players already have what they need.

While Bungie has promised new and fresh takes on storytelling in The Final Shape and beyond, that doesn’t help the present. What also doesn’t help is the public perception of Bungie as a company. Recently, Joe Blackburn left Bungie – a face that the community had grown to trust immensely, the company pulled the Starter Pack bundle from Steam following backlash, several high profile developers were laid off, and a four-times World’s First raider was permanently banned for having a Rome: Total War memory editor tool installed on his computer.

Adding to the problem was a recent comment by PlayStation chairman Hiroki Totoki during a Q&A session after Sony’s earnings report. Totoki said that he had visited Bungie’s studio and while employees were motivated, he noted that there was “room for improvement from a business perspective” specifically in regard to expenses and “assuming accountability for development timelines.”

Taken in isolation this comment is rather innocuous but when you consider Destiny 2 sales were running 45 percent below projections for the year in 2023, it’s not a good look. How much worse might sales be now that 70 percent of the playerbase has dropped off since the start of the season, let alone compared to the launch of Lightfall?

All of this culminates in a general dissatisfaction of Bungie and at worse, a distrust of how the company is choosing to handle the direction of Destiny 2. There’s only so much talking and promising of improvements that can help, at some point players need to experience these changes in-game. But for some Reddit users, the recent patch previews have done little to ignite the excitement for The Final Shape and what comes after.

These players, and many others, are waiting for that moment where a piece of news or reveal gives them a purpose to not only play The Final Shape, but stay with this now ten year old franchise. The last ten years have been ramping up to this final confrontation with the big bad, and much like how revealing the monster in a horror movie strips it of its power, defeating the Witness might have an analogous effect on the franchise.

Compounding the issue of player numbers are the recent smash hit releases. Palworld surpassed CS:GO’s concurrent player count while Helldivers 2 has seen such crushing popularity that the servers couldn’t handle the load. And now with the Final Fantay 7 Rebirth release, there’s even more great games pulling players away from Destiny 2.

It’s a tough road for Bungie moving forward. It needs to over-deliver with The Final Shape in a similar fashion to Forsaken or The Witch Queen if it wants to reignite the passion in players and keep them coming back. There have been numerous “last chance” moments in the game’s history and it’s managed to bounce back, but there’s something different in the air this time. The symptom that is dwindling player numbers speaks volumes and while it’s not ideal to play the same game every day until the heat death of the universe, it would be great if the light in Destiny 2 doesn’t flicker out with a whimper.

Sam Chandler

Guides Editor

Hailing from the land down under, Sam Chandler brings a bit of the southern hemisphere flair to his work. After bouncing round a few universities, securing a bachelor degree, and entering the video game industry, he's found his new family here at Shacknews as a Guides Editor. There's nothing he loves more than crafting a guide that will help someone. If you need help with a guide, or notice something not quite right, you can message him on X: @SamuelChandler