‘Destiny 2’ Player Numbers And Sales Are Rocketing Up Ahead Of ‘The Final Shape’

Bungie has one job right now, get people excited to play Destiny 2’s final Light and Darkness expansion, The Final Shape, out in just over a week from now. It appears they have accomplished that mission.

Right now, Destiny 2 has attracted an hugely healthy playerbase in the run-up to the launch of the expansion, and is selling content well enough to top Steam charts.

Destiny 2 has now become a fixture inside Steam’s Top 10 most played games, often putting up 100,000 plus concurrents a night, despite the fact that the launch of its current season, Season of the Wish, was back in November of 2023.

Deserving credit, of course, is Bungie’s midseason “Into the Light” update, which among other things brought in the horde mode Onslaught activity and the ultra-endgame challenge Pantheon. It also reprised two of Destiny 2’s best vaulted exotic missions and introduced three new Crucible maps.

As such, the playercount increase and subsequent retention have been remarkable. With the launch of Into the Light, Destiny 2’s playercount more than doubled on Steam overnight, and over the last two months has only crept higher overall, rather than decreasing after an initial surge. The game now seems poised to eclipse Lightfall’s all-time concurrent record of 316,750 players when The Final Shape launches if we’re already doing 100,000 evenings right now.

Then there are sales, where Destiny 2, technically a “free” offering on Steam, is the best-selling game on the service in terms of revenue with only CS2 occasionally beating it, but that’s a game with a massive internal cosmetics/skin economy. And Destiny 2 is even topping it some days.

Given that Destiny 2 itself is free (“free”), those sales are mainly reflective of The Final Shape pre-orders really ramping up now. Previously, months ago, it was said that internally Bungie was worried about low Final Shape preorders. Now, you have devs publicly celebrating these increases on the timeline. It’s quite the mood shift.

There’s a narrative that Bungie performs best when “its backs are against the wall” which may sound heroic, but it’s kind of brutal, as it comes after the layoff of 100+ employees and it’s well known internal Bungie leadership is poor, and all those leaders are still there, meaning I’m not sure what working conditions there have been like recently. But in general, the on-the-ground Bungie employees emphatically repeat they are the most proud of this out of anything they’ve made, and they can’t wait for people to play.

It’s been a perfect storm of good content and good marketing producing good vibes. The Final Shape still has to be enormously successful, not just “solid,” for the health of Bungie, and the game can’t lose too many players right after. But for now, things are on a very good track, that much is clear.

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