You can say that it’s been six years, so fans are simply burning out on Destiny 2 as they leave the game or stay but complain uh, a whole lot about it (myself included, of course).
But I think looking at the data, I don’t know if that’s really what’s going on here. There are certain moments in the lifespan of IPs where things just…take a hard turn. The most famous example I can think of this is in The Walking Dead, which was flying high with insane viewership numbers in season 6. Then…Negan brutally killed Glenn, a moment that I know caused many to turn off the show forever, and it never came close to recovering its viewership.
I can’t say for sure if Lightfall is that moment, but looking at the numbers, that’s the sense I’m getting. I don’t think many people realize that Lightfall’s launch was actually the peak of Destiny concurrent players…ever. It had 316,651 at its peak on Steam when the expansion launched. And as good as Witch Queen might have been, it still topped its 289,895 back in February of 2022.
So yes, there was in fact an enormous amount of interest in Destiny 2 when Lightfall hit. More than there had ever been, in fact. But then Lightfall arrived and it was…no Witch Queen. It was no Beyond Light. It was no Forsaken. I’d consider it better than Shadowkeep, but that’s about it.
I don’t know if I need to go through every reason Lightfall was bad again, but the shortlist is that it felt entirely extraneous to the story, the Neomuna plotline was bad, as were the new characters, Osiris was a grump, Strand was implemented into the campaign poorly (even if it would end up being fun later). The entire crux of the story, The Veil, was never explained at all with information only now being drip-fed in ill-conceived, hidden weekly lore drops. And of course, there were no significant additions of any kind to PvP or Gambit.
Players didn’t like it. By the middle of the first season after Lightfall Season of the Deep, players have crashed from that 316,000 to 87,000. No, those aren’t all-time lows necessarily, and Bungie is hanging on a bit to some players, but it’s the biggest sustained drop given the highs of Lightfall. Things should not have fallen off this hard, but I truly believe the expansion was that off-putting. Not just anecdotally (even if I’ve heard a zillion players say this) but in the data as well.
I’d also argue that maybe there was a second moment here, not the same as Lightfall, but one that accelerated the drops. That would be the reveal of Marathon in May of 2023, Bungie’s new game which looks very cool, yet also explains where many, many of Destiny’s formerly top people went, including giant chunks of the old PvP team. That felt somewhat dispiriting to the Destiny 2 community, I think.
Given that The Final Shape is the grand finale of the current years-spanning “arc” of the series, you would hope that it would get past Lightfall numbers. But I do believe that expansion was genuinely damaging in a way I don’t think we’ve ever seen before. With a record number of players’ attention at launch it didn’t deliver, and cut its momentum before its last chapter here.
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