Destiny 2

Bungie

Destiny 2 players are not letting go after the recent news that Bungie/Sony will no longer support the game after next week’s sizable June 9 update. Given the 11-year history of the series, it’s hard to blame them, but how they can express their displeasure can only manifest in so many ways.

I’m hearing about plans to spam the chat of today’s huge Sony State of Play with “We want Destiny 3” messaging, but past that, there’s a larger movement to get as many current and lapsed Destiny 2 players into the game on June 9 with the goal of hitting high playercount watermarks.

Some goals are lofty, others seem more reachable. It is already very impressive to see that since the expansive, “dream checklist” June 9 reveal, concurrent Destiny 2 Steam players have more than doubled, almost tripled, with overall players doing at least somewhat similar. The game has gone from around a 10,000 baseline to now 28,000 being the recent high on Steam, and this is before literally anything in the actual game has changed, with that patch still a full week away today, arriving next Tuesday.

The big “goal” here is to try to break the concurrent playercount record of 316,000, which happened during Lightfall (The Final Shape would have beaten it were there not some launch day technical problems). Is that doable?

My guess is no. So, so many players have departed in the last six month void that it would be hard to wrangle that many, especially when that actual record was set two years ago, and that was the final content update of a ten-year saga. This update, despite having tons of good changes, is not adding actual new playable content short of a new, altered patrol event that seems like it was meant to lead into an expansion that no longer exists.

That said, I still think players can put up high numbers. If we’re talking 28,000 concurrents (and 300,000+ daily players), it stands to reason that will multiply when the update is out (side note: while the concurrent data we have access to is on Steam, Destiny players are around a 4:1 console base).

If I were creating a “goal” for the community, it would be to surpass the release of the first post-Light and Darkness expansion, Edge of Fate, which arrived with 108,000 concurrents, about a third of what The Final Shape did, which Bungie considered an underperformance. I think that’s both achievable and impressive, even if we’re not talking 300,000+. As for total players, a million would sure be nice for a game that is being summarily executed after this update.

The problem, of course, is that high numbers are unlikely to be sustainable beyond a few weeks, or at best months, given that there are zero updates to come, according to Bungie. Fans have celebrated cryptic messages from community lead DMG seemingly encouraging players to keep fighting. Even with my sourcing, I’m still not 100% certain what’s going on behind the scenes, but I don’t think a demonstration like this can lead to more significant D2 content or an instant D3 greenlight. My hope is that either Bungie can keep a small team on Destiny 2 doing at least some updates, or enough interest is shown in the IP to greenlight some other new Destiny project. Again, we just don’t know.

But hey, it’s worth a shot.

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