The latest expansion to Sony Interactive Entertainment and Bungie’s Destiny 2, Edge of Fate, has launched with only one-third of the active players seen with the arrival of prior expansions.
According to the Steam player stats (via SteamDB), Destiny 2: Edge of Fate has peaked at 99,193 concurrent players, which is only one-third of the active players seen with the launch of the game’s previous expansions. In comparison, Destiny 2: The Final Shape peaked at around 314,000 concurrent players, Destiny 2: Lightfall at around 316,000, and Destiny 2: The Witch Queen at around 290,000, indicating a sharp decline in the number of returning players for the latest expansion.
Long-time fans have expressed disappointment with the lack of meaningful changes to Destiny 2’s core loops, the lack of true new enemy types, and Bungie not doing enough to bring them back. Others argue that he game is not friendly to new or returning players. The falloff to one-third of the active players seen with the launch of prior expansions suggests that many fans moved to other online games after finishing Destiny 2: The Final Shape. Meanwhile, some claim that Destiny 2 is well past its peak, and that Bungie ought to be looking to move towards a potential Destiny 3.
However, Bungie currently has its hands full with the development of Marathon, a game that has been in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. Early during its pre-production, an internal artist incorporated a number of graphic elements from a designer known as ANTIREAL without permission or credit.These elements, consisting of icons and text, were featured on a decal sheet that was added to the project back in 2020, which led to the assets eventually making their way into the game’s alpha build. During a recent developer livestream, Joe Cross, the franchise art director for Marathon, issued a public statement addressing the plagiarism situation and outlining the steps Bungie is taking to correct it.
