Bungie’s Destiny 2’s day in the sun is far from over as the long-running MMO continues to struggle to retain its audience. After players already went through the “worst week in the history of Destiny”, Bungie’s once-beloved game is now continuing to drain players at a worrying rate.
Following the end of The Final Shape, Destiny 2 player counts have continued on a downward trend. While The Edge of Fate expansion was supposed to kickstart a new era of the MMO, Destiny 2 has just hit its lowest ever player count on Steam.
Via TheGamesHub, the latest expansion already launched with a shockingly low player count for a major expansion. While The Final Shape saw a day-one peak of 314,634 players on Steam, The Edge of Fate launched at just 98,211 players on the same platform.
In a shocking drop, Destiny 2 managed to fall to its lowest-ever player count on Steam to under 8,000 players on Steam. Previously, the lowest-ever player count for Bungie’s MMO since its 2019 Steam release was 18,439 players concurrently jumping on the game, over double its new low.
This isn’t too surprising considering the fact that many believed the main Destiny story to be over and finished with the release of The Final Shape. The ten-year journey that Bungie originally pitched with its Light and Darkness campaign concluded, and players are now weighing up the point of the current game with others asking for a fresh start with a Destiny 3.
Currently, Destiny 2 has suffered due to a controversial change of design that pushes players away from the game’s social elements. Bungie’s new Portals system pushes players towards the churn of grinding and turns the game from an MMO experience into a matchmaking process.
There is hope that the next major expansion can turn the ride, Destiny 2: Renegades. This new Star Wars-themed expansion releases this December, and will introduce players to the Lawless Frontier. With Marathon also potentially releasing later this year, Bungie is betting all its chips on two projects, but will any of them work out?
