Destiny 2’s player count sinks amid controversial season

Destiny 2’s player count has continued to shrink as the end of 2024 approaches, with the game’s population reaching further lows on PC.

Bungie’s long-running looter shooter enjoyed a massive burst of popularity thanks to The Final Shape back in June, recording a peak on Steam of over 300,000 concurrent players, but interest has sharply declined since.

While Episode Revenant’s release in October triggered a small resurgence, peak player counts on Valve’s platform haven’t managed to break higher than five figures since July 2024.

Numerous bugs – including incorrect perk weightings and certain events not working properly – have persisted throughout Revenant, with many fans similarly registering complaints about the removal of seasonal weapon crafting.

Whether these issues directly contributed to the freefall isn’t clear, but they’re certainly not helping Destiny 2’s failing fortunes.

Destiny 2’s PC population continues to fall

Per Steam Charts, the sequel, released in 2017, recorded a concurrent player count of 11,700 on December 19.

While Steam Charts doesn’t provide historical data for live player numbers on Steam for the entire duration of its availability on the platform, at no other point in December – excluding maintenance periods where the servers are periodically taken offline – did figures dip lower.

From the historical data that is available – and observable in the chart below – however, December 2024 has been the worst month on record for Destiny 2’s Steam version, recording a current peak of 36,896. This is in contrast to October and November’s 89,512 and 53,135 respectively.

It’s important to note that these figures are accurate as of December 21. While there’s a good chance they’ll increase for the remainder of 2024’s final month, it’s unlikely they’ll surpass November’s total.

Should December’s peak player total fail to surpass September 2024’s 41,373, it’ll officially be the lowest on record.

These stats only account for the Steam version of Destiny 2. Neither Microsoft nor Sony provide details on player numbers for specific games, so it’s unclear how console populations compare, though they’re expected to be higher due to the franchise originally being console-only.

Bouncing back

Dwindling numbers of Guardians between large updates is hardly a novel concept for Destiny 2.

Lulls between expansions are to be expected for any live service title, but with Bungie moving away from the traditional expansion model and Episodes not being the overhaul of seasons many had hoped for, uncertainty is commonplace.

Fans know that the studio has big plans in 2025 in the form of Frontiers – an all-new approach to content delivery – but with Bungie not yet ready to pull back the curtain on what exactly it will entail, nobody knows what the future holds for Destiny 2.