A large percentage of Destiny 2 players have abandoned ship, and the community isn’t the least bit shocked.
Months ahead of The Final Shape’s June 2024 launch date, IGN reported that Bungie developers were worried the company would face further turmoil if the expansion failed to succeed.
Critics and players alike sang Bungie’s praises once the Destiny 2 expansion arrived. And on Steam alone, the game nearly broke its own player count record by reaching 314,634 peak concurrent users within the first day.
Despite these incredible highs, the Destiny developer still laid off 220 employees at the end of July 2024. The game has not maintained its good health either, considering the player count’s precipitous drop in the last several months.
Destiny 2 suffers massive drop-off of players after Final Shape
First spotted by Forbes’ Paul Tassi, the Destiny sequel has lost about 90% of its audience on PC since June 2024.
At the time of writing, SteamDB logs 36,610 as the number of peak players for Destiny 2 in the last 30 days.
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It’s a steep fall-off from the 300,000-plus PC users who were invested seven months ago, even when considering that The Final Shape marked the end of Destiny’s traditional seasonal model.
Chatter in the Destiny 2 subreddit shows the community is far from surprised by the news. “Look at the content we’re getting, no wonder people don’t want to play,” reads one highly upvoted reply in the thread.
Recalling Bungie’s announcement that Destiny 2 won’t receive any more annual expansions, another player commented, “The company told us the game is essentially going on life support. It makes sense the player base will dwindle.”
Others chimed in to say they’ve stopped playing because the experience started feeling like a chore. Reads one such response, “I have limited time to play and with that limited time, I want to feel rewarded. I stopped playing because the game felt more like a job than something I did for fun.”
The Final Shape proved Bungie can still wow Destiny audiences, but it’s unclear if the current update model will ever create the same spark.
