16-07-2025
Destiny 2: The Edge Of Fate's Peak Playercount Is Less Than A Third Of ‘The Final Shape'
Destiny 2
It's time to get used to a new era of Destiny 2, both for players, and for Bungie itself.
Destiny 2 has just entered its 'Fate' era, with the launch of its first post-Light and Darkness expansion, The Edge of Fate. And that expansion has just hit an unfortunate milestone as the least-played Destiny 2 expansion since launch, by a significant margin.
The Edge of Fate just failed to top 100,000 concurrent players on Steam last night, clocking in at 99,193. This is under a third of The Final Shape's launch players a year ago, and well under half the previous least-played record of Beyond Light. Here's how the expansions stack up:
Destiny 2
To dispel a few common notions, no, even though it's not the weekend/raid launch day, history says that literal launch day will be the overall peak. And yes, this is just one platform, but there is no reason at all to imagine these same declines are not present on console, as that would make little sense.
I predicted numbers around this level last month when I used other pre-launch peaks to indicate how much players would jump for the expansion, and it was about a 3x multiplier. Here, those figures indicated a potential peak of 114,000 concurrents for The Edge of Fate, and it turns out that was an overestimate. This 99,000 figure is just 10,000 more than the launch of Destiny 2's Revenant Episode last October. Yikes.
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Is this a disaster? I mean, it's quite bad, even if it's not unexpected. The question here is if delivering less yearly content for only a slightly reduced price is enough to cut costs to make a significantly lower playercount viable. That would also need to join probably some sort of increase in player spending. But we don't have access to all that data.
Destiny 2
One question is if with these low numbers if Edge of Fate will be the peak indefinitely for the new Fate era. There is another similarly small expansion coming in six months, Renegades. It could draw in more players with its Star Wars-adjacent theme, or the opposite could happen. If people don't like Edge of Fate, they may just be done with the series from here. And I think in many ways it's easy to not really like Edge of Fate or all the changes Bungie just made to the entire game (more on that in a review I'll have up later).
This is just where Destiny is now, and it was pretty unavoidable if the decision was made to keep pumping out live content indefinitely rather than take a break, regroup and put out a Destiny 3, which would no doubt have done very, very big numbers. Now, the next question will be what the new 'baseline' is going to be.
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