Destiny 2 has been hemorrhaging players, and Bungie hasn’t figured out how to stop the bleeding. Fans may be wondering if the game is shutting down due to the plummeting player count and maybe even the studio’s focus on Marathon, seemingly overshadowing its attention to Destiny 2.
In fact, the game’s player count paints a bleak picture, no matter how you look at it, with all-time low player counts being more of the rule than the exception. There’s also an expectation among parts of the gaming community that a game will shut down if it’s not successful enough—driven, in part, by the fact that expensive games that aren’t big hits do get shut down.
To make matters trickier for Bungie, the studio is trying to juggle two different IPs, seeing major changes in leadership, and seemingly still feeling the ripples of two voracious waves of layoffs within a year in 2023-24. But that doesn’t mean Destiny 2 is going to die, at least not for now. Here’s what we think about the game hypothetically shutting down.
Why Destiny 2 is (probably) not shutting down
Bungie hasn’t officially said Destiny 2 will shut down, and given its importance to the studio, it’s unlikely the game will be sunset overnight.
Destiny 2 is still, presumably, a money-maker for Bungie, despite a huge share of the studio’s chips lying in Marathon. From a financial perspective, the in-game Eververse store appears fuller than ever, with new sets coming in relatively often, so the company clearly continues to invest in microtransactions. Maybe a bit too much, like when Bungie pushed a would-be Iron Banner set into the EV Store for Silver.
The weakness lies in the gameplay side of things. The changes from The Edge of Fate seem to keep Destiny 2 operating with as few resources as possible, likely due to staff being assigned to Marathon or laid off altogether. The Portal was quite a miss, the expansion’s campaign was lukewarm at best, and there just doesn’t seem to be enough new in Destiny—in quality or in quantity—to keep players coming back.
That said, if there’s anything Destiny 2 players have demonstrated over the years, it’s that they’ll keep coming back as long as Bungie makes it worth their while. It’s a peerless, almost unexplainable devotion. There will always be demand for the game as long as the studio does more hits than misses—and that’s the tricky part.
Is there still hope for Destiny 2?
This might be one of the most difficult, divisive questions for Destiny 2 fans. At its core, there is nothing that can compete with it—so much so that the only thing capable of killing Destiny was Destiny.
It does take a unique breed of special to keep players invested in a franchise for 10 years. It takes even more to make fans stick around after turbulent times such as Lightfall, Season of Plunder, Echoes, Heresy, and the Year of Prophecy.
On the flip side, Bungie burned through a lot of player goodwill over the past few years, asking them to tough it out through bad releases, unpopular measures, and avoidable mistakes. It’s hard to blame those who left a while ago or those who just threw in the towel. There’s very little margin for error, and that’s a bad enough situation to be in—but it’s even worse when your playerbase is fractured and scattered.
Comebacks are some of Bungie’s biggest strengths. Forsaken is still lauded as one of the best moments in Destiny 2, and the same applies to The Witch Queen, Season of the Seraph, and Into the Light. Digging itself out of this quagmire, however, requires consistent, consecutive greatness. Passable is just another shovelful of sand on the game’s imminent grave. It’s not looking good for the developer, though: the next major update, Shadow & Order, is likely facing a delay at a time when there’s almost no incentive to log in. Asking to wait might drain the last slivers of goodwill from its fans, so anything that happens after that must be at least excellent to hold the game together.
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