On June 9 this year, Destiny 2 got its final update and officially ended its 12-year-long run on the market. While the game remains fully playable, Bungie and Sony will not provide any more content updates to it, leaving it in a melancholy state of limbo.
But even suspended between the worlds of the living and the dead, Destiny 2 continues to thrive, though admittedly not on the same levels as it did while it was actively alive. According to numbers clocked in by SteamDB, Destiny 2, at this very moment, has 14,883 players in-game, with 19,410 logging in during peak hours within the last day.
And peaks between 19,000 and 22,000 seem to be rather commonplace and have been for a very long time now. Every week, Destiny 2 somehow manages to retain a strong core audience of players who, no doubt, keep playing all the content it has accumulated over the years. Even though no new stuff is coming – ever – the game nonetheless has a lot to offer to whoever is still around, though for how long remains to be seen.
What I found more interesting than the fact that a massive live-service game has a lot of players left is that Marathon has nearly five times fewer players than Destiny 2, despite active development and new seasonal content dropping every so often. With Season 3 just around the corner, Marathon struggles to maintain more than 3,000 concurrent players on Steam, and I’m willing to bet that consoles aren’t faring much better.
This means that Sony and Bungie killed off a game that, even dead, retains a good chunk of players to pour all their efforts into supporting a title that barely anyone plays. That’s genuinely nebulous to me because, even though I really liked Marathon and especially its worldbuilding and art style, I cannot understand the thought process behind going down this route.
Sure, Destiny 2 wasn’t in its best years anymore, partly because of how botched the development was, but Marathon just did not have amazing prospects even during the first couple of months after launch. With the final update, Destiny 2 actually got 167,000 people to play the game concurrently, proving there was a lot of life left in it if Sony and Bungie wanted to pursue it.
But Marathon, even at release, had 88,000 people. It’s just too niche, and even more niche within a niche.
Either way, though, Bungie seems to be diluting itself slowly but surely. It’s trying to lease out its massive HQ, it shut down Destiny 2‘s development, and I’m pretty certain Marathon won’t last for much longer. What the ultimate result of these decisions will be is anyone’s guess, but I don’t believe it’ll be pretty for the studio that once brought us Halo.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.destructoid.com/destiny-2-shut-down-but-has-more-players-than-marathon/
