It has not been a great week for Destiny 2, which has come after a not great couple months for Destiny, now in its Edge of Fate-initiated Portal-based era.
We all knew that there would be less Destiny 2 content produced in the wake of The Final Shape, Bungie was pretty clear about the direction that was going with two smaller expansions a year and no more true seasons or episodes. The question, however, was what the new baseline was going to be for Destiny 2 going forward, and I think enough time has passed to get a general idea.
Using the long-term available Steam metrics, which should mirror console trends to a certain extent, I’m flashing back to 2020-2023 or so, when most would view the game as healthy. There?
The average peak of season launch spikes were around 200,000 concurrent playersThe average low points during lulls during seasons were around 85,000 concurrent players.
Now we can compare that to now:
The average peak in the wake of The Final Shape for episode launches was around 85,000 concurrent players. The average low point is around 40,000 concurrent players.
During this time, the launch of Edge of Fate peaked at 108,000 players. The recent Ash and Iron “major update” launch peaked at 54,000, doubling the game’s recent playercount before that. A week later, it’s almost back at the old values. The past day had a 23,000 peak.
Taking all this, at least presently, we’re looking at more than 50% drop for the baseline highs and lows of the game. And I would argue that this is probably an underestimate given that we’re moving out of the episode era entirely and into a space with no actual seasons over the course of six months, and the first attempt at a major update has fallen very flat.
Disaster? That depends, actually.
I don’t think it’s a surprise to players, Bungie or Sony that Destiny 2’s playercount has dropped significantly in the wake of The Final Shape, or the game’s health a few years ago. The question for Bungie and Sony is whether or not the game is still profitable, or earning at least enough to be viable.
I think you can make the case that Destiny is produced at least 50% less content, if not more (this is why The Portal exists), and unfortunately, through layoffs, attrition and Marathon, there are likely 50% less people working on Destiny than there were a few years ago. Microtransactions have been dramatically scaled up, and the cost for a year of content has only dipped a little bit with less on offer. The long and short here is that two smaller expansions a year with very little in between is in fact going to cost way less to produce. But will that match the playercount drop? I think that depends, and I do think we’re going to see some acceleration from here. Renegades, however, does look more promising than Edge of Fate did, and cheesy or not, Star Wars is likely to bring in more players.
I certainly would not call the situation with Destiny good right now. Player morale is bottoming out and even long term players are starting to move on in droves. With almost no way to attract new players, if these declines are accelerated, whatever the cost/earning ratio may be now, it’s likely to get worse from here.
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