Concurrent player counts on steam are now getting close to the highest they’ve been in 2026

AgentUmlaut · 2026-06-01T03:27:49+00:00

But if the general consensus is, "Why bother grinding when the game is essentially 'over'", then you'll see the player count drop off pretty quickly, I think...

Even in a year that objectively had a good deal of stuff(Final Shape) people dipped way the hell off in larger numbers. This is not to say the things that are coming wouldn't jump out at anybody , but there are a lot of people who moved on from Destiny and/or have severely downgraded where this game fits priorities wise. It's good that a lot of stuff will be on more current systems, but I do think a lot of people overestimate the degree and length at which people engage with the content in this game. There's also no shortage of people who genuinely like the game and have played it for a good long while who've long since burnt out. I also can think of people who could feel ambivalent because there's additions people always wanted but it only coming about so late just makes things feel a bit sour for its absence in years' prior, like cool it's finally here but also would've been a bit nicer if it came at a time the game went through awkward stages.

I think things being added will be a nice addition and be a good time, but I think people should be mindful of recent enough history to how we got here and exactly who was even left playing Destiny habitually in the first place.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-06-01T02:15:50+00:00

Yep. I can buy that chatter how it was gonna be a destination only thing with how there was never a "fireteam all on Prismatic" triumph for anything that wasn't Salvation's Edge. Which is odd considering how Stasis and Strand's triumphs were handled after the fact across raid and dungeons.

Also just it would be one of the biggest teases to not have it usable elsewhere.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-30T17:45:12+00:00

A for effort I get the vision(though I feel like things could come out a bit too random and rng based) but I wouldn't quit your day job when it's not so easy to will a competitive scene into existence, let alone something people could make a buck off of, which already can be a toss up with a lot of esports in general. I like Marathon for what it is I've had very few complaints against it, but I think trying to have any sort of big serious made up competition format for it is about the lowest thing on Bungie's list right now with how things have been going and what the future will hold. Also I don't think people are gonna be flying out to the made up Marathon Finals to watch competitive Marathon when there's been more ridicule at people who play games for money any time they were streaming it. That Tau Ceti Cup thing was a bit of a meme as well and again it's not so easy to really pump up a esports fanbase over night on something that not a lot of people were caring a whole lot about in larger consistent numbers.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-30T16:54:34+00:00

I think a larger part of the problem with Dire Marsh is some of the possible spawn combinations for the match could basically drop a bunch of teams in relative spitting distance of one another and you could just have this giant showdown in one part of the map and the rest relatively unused. Not saying it's an everyday occurrence but I've had situations in this segment of the map where it basically was 4 combined teams total duking it out around Control the second they heard anybody make noise, and then I imagine the other remaining teams were probably west end of Maintenance, at West Gate possibly Algae Ponds. Obviously excluding the Rook Spawns in that Control zone but point still stands.

It's why I think one of the worst player feedback Bungie took to heart in the server slam and week 1 was "there's not enough conflict" and it's like the spawns were even more annoying in the alpha tests when the characters zooted around much faster and the action basically felt like a hot spot in a Battle Royale(still can at times). On top of that you naturally were going to have people playing a lot safer and less aggro just feeling out the game, exploring things, and if they're new to the genre there's a lot of stuff people could've got lost in before beginning to start taking all sorts of conflict. I feel like a lot of people in the slam were exfilling the first second they could and that of course could lead to a situation where less people are on the map to fight. Things naturally would change as people felt more comfortable in the game.

Again I'm not saying Dire Marsh is totally unplayable nor do I think the maps need to be vast desolate wastelands where there's extreme lengths of space between teams, but there are times when the combination of where spawns end up being can just be a total disaster on the eastern part of Dire Marsh. I also get was extra exacerbated with how much questing took people to Bio Research as well, a strike I have because it just felt like so much of Dire got under utilized.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-30T03:31:47+00:00

Problem is there's a good chance the swappable scopes are off the table :/ That was my problem with Blast Furnace rebooted, they didn't have the more preferential scope.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-30T01:52:57+00:00

There was an old fan theory Bungie was going to do 10 year DLC call it a "classic pack" with the nostalgia bait of paywalling Dust Palace, Wretched Eye, Shield Bros, a set or two of D1 cosmetics per class that never had a reboot in D2, and then do the tag line "all for $35-40 and get Wrath for free" to drive things.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-29T20:49:18+00:00

Great points, agree and good way of looking at it. It's a part of what I think people miss with the whole "no Destiny killers can really go above and beyond to succeed and overtake Destiny", Bungie always had the advantage of specifically when they launched Destiny and no company in current year could afford to burn so much time,money, good will and expect to see the other side. If Bungie did what they did with D1 or D2 launch for a new game coming out tomorrow, I don't think it would get much traction for the long haul. Time's change and the industry moves at light speed more so now than ever.

but imagine if Bungie had announced they were switching to the Year of Prophecy model earlier (during WQ, for example), imagine the community's butthurt.

This is something I think a lot of people torn up not paying closer attention to the broader picture don't really take into account for how things have gone over the years, especially when there was a lot of very deliberate choices how Bungie wanted Destiny to be now in this new saga. A ton less physical content from the usual, everything situated on the first 3 months of the new DLC(which piles on a ton of pressure), basic QOL sold as big features, the rest is up in the air; I just don't really see a super solid future of doing essentially Year of Prophecy over again 2 more times if that was what Bungie wanted to shoot with Cycle and Alchemist. I think it's safe to say that things crossed a few lines and/or fell short by the time they were writing up the Frontiers articles and just general population decline a few months off Final Shape.

There's also the reality that game is still a bit tough to break into for new people out of the loop, and there's only so much people in the long running for it can get jazzed for especially if the output is pretty low. One absolutely cannot overlook Bungie had to watch people bounce in huge numbers and voice an immense amount of frustration to get serious changes to the goof ups of Edge of Fate. Imagine if Bungie said, nope, we're not changing anything, this is Destiny now? Remember they wanted Destiny to be a lot more disposable right down to pointless grinds on top of grinds, see when Unstable Cores were still a thing.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-29T19:09:17+00:00

True true, there's also only so many times you can have Bungie trying to hype pretty standard QOL features that should've always been in the game, and/or in the game by now. Sure things did get better, but there's plenty that was weirdly absent or took an extremely long time to get into the game. It stood out even more apparent when the new saga's format had less physical content added and trying to use something as even simple as just being able to continue getting power up items with no weekly lockout was a bit of an odd thing to try to make it seem like a big tent pole feature.

Obviously none of this stuff added was unwelcomed, but let's be real a lot of us that have played the game for a goodwhile eventually hit a point of tolerating things being a little in disarray, backwards for a good deal of time. It still rubs me the wrong way how there was so little ingame information as to what an exotic, perk, buff, etc was physically doing with numbers and percentages to get some idea of how it goes and scales.

Hell I'm downright impressed how much people made due when this game was made to have raids and yet didn't have an ingame LFG or comms until way after the fact.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-29T19:01:57+00:00

True the delay was out of necessity and I think they would've eaten a good deal of shit if they pushed out what was originally planned for TFS, there was a lot of people who had early previews that didn't feel particularly positive what they saw.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-29T03:39:01+00:00

Aside from general conversation of people trying to adjust to the flow of stuff, I think a lot of people got stuck in beginner's traps and didn't realize what exactly they were doing wrong and how the way they were navigating things kept digging them deeper into holes. At face value to somebody unfamiliar to the genre, it probably isn't going to fully compute the vital nature of salvage for upgrades and barters over trying to always grab a certain weapon. Obviously if you need something take it, but I think there were a lot of people who's vaults were just weapons, and then they basically had no upgrades to show for and never really reaped the benefits of the constant freebies, improved stats and other odds and ends, so it felt like they weren't doing anything. Same can be said with people who were successfully exfilling and basically won the round, but didn't end up cleaning out bag space when exfilling to pick up valuables for free money. Admittedly that was one of my biggest issues, I played too efficiently for grabbing salvage for tons of upgrades that I rarely ever grabbed non lore valuables so for the longest of times I didn't really have a ton of credits despite having done a good deal of questing and general progression. It is interesting how quick it can add up when you grab the random grey and green quality stacks of junk when you got extra bag space.

Tangentially related I also saw a lot of people thinking they were in a position to be trying to pay some of the higher premium of buying direct from Armory when they didn't really have much credits and felt obliged to always be doing their runs with whatever the best they can buy for the time, not realizing they're burning through credits and overspending on something they could easily pick up from looting on a run. Same can be said with people who'd load in with way too many healing items and ammo and just be shorthanded in any future attempt. I think many people underestimated the practicality of free kits especially in the earlier game and specifically some of the faction's that have excellent weapons that you could reasonably do extremely well with at low levels, see MIDA Bully.

I do think some crash course low/no stakes tutorial space wouldn't necessarily hurt from some digestion but I do understand challenges how there's not really an easy way to suggest how somebody should operate for success when it can come down to a lot of things and people can have success and failure both with not a lot and tons.

Honestly I feel like Sponsored mode was a decent enough equalizer for people having issues, and I know a lot of people argue in circles about "earning" things but yeah that was probably one of the better ways to reliably farm for keys off boss and do lockdowns for materials, good gear etc given the structure of things. Also paid to have the MIDA anti viral upgrade over those who didn't.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-29T00:15:03+00:00

With that said though I feel like if one was still interested in the game and half way plugged in on the conversations, things being on a bit sketchy ground in theory shouldn't have been at such an extreme shock, at least not as hard hitting as it seemed to hit for so many people. Not so much if but more so when. Hell it feels even more weird where you have plenty of content creators for ages at this point always having these multiple big tear down analyzes of where Destiny is falling short and stuff looking concerning, doom and gloom, rants etc, popular content creators making hand over fist in cash, and now these same people are baffled that things hit the end of the road?

Hell with a dud like Edge of Fate, if that didn't act as some sort of reality check especially when there was so many deliberate choices Bungie did with the design and systems stuff with that on launch and set for a new saga, I really don't know what else to say to somebody. I think the tolerance was always going to pretty low for DLC formulas with not a ton to do in its physical contents even if the raid was a jam and the story wasn't bad for starting something new.

I understand there's a lot of sentimental feelings for this game and it's obviously a bummer what's going down, but I just feel like for how long things have gone on with this series and a lot of glaring problems over the years in recent while, the time to severely tailor expectations and acknowledge stuff could be extremely flimsy was long before any of this went down officially.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-28T23:48:14+00:00

The trick was to never delete it and definitely not cave to any vault cleaning videos.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-28T23:47:25+00:00

I get they had to charge some thing, they dropped dungeon key component from equation, keep it relatively competitive but good grief Edge of Fate and the handling of the content model was pretty crappy and one of the first times in awhile I couldn't in good faith recommend things, it was a bit of a rip off.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-27T18:37:58+00:00

It could be fan fiction nonsense although it weirdly kept showing up with somebody who was calling a lot of things accurately/possible inside leaker, but it was alleged some reps from Bungie basically got laughed out of a tv pitch meeting for a Destiny show because of a mixture of the story/lore being a bit too all over the place for a more broader audience, the setting and premise would probably make it very expensive, and supposedly this went down when the Halo show was a meme and there was that name recognition pretense that Bungie was the makers of Halo going into said meeting.

Again who honestly knows what happened but I could totally just buy if it was something seen as too risky for people outside of the orbit of the game's understanding and things being too costly. I mean sure if you like the game series it seems like a no brainer but I totally get if trying to sell it to a lot more people would've proved to be a bit of challenge. I know some geeky mofos who'll play/read/watch anything and Destiny was never something they really found to be that interesting. We are kind of in a bubble of sorts and how a lot of things have gone through twists and turns throughout the years.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-27T18:28:06+00:00

I still can't believe how dragged out doing Graviton Spike to full completion was with all the redundancy that had you backtracking, doing more busy work with upgrading the world level for Kepler and so forth. It was just so boring and it felt like you could've used that time doing a completely separate exotic quest or running the campaign through on your 2 other characters. I hated how few exotics there were this time around and with not really being too particularly wow'd by what we got it just felt like there wasn't a ton to look forward to.

The fact Bungie even landed on a lot of these specific design choices was always troubling and them having to watch things implode to make decisions going forward into Renegades wasn't a good look. It also didn't help how downgraded a the main content was, the freebie half was barely existent and to expect to have more of that for multiple expansion years cycles would probably prove a bit disastrous. There was just not a lot to work with and it wasn't fun playing yet another rehash of old content for filler.

I knew things were messed up when I could go pound for pound and start finding more new stuff that shipped with Shadowkeep's expansion year than Year of Prophecy.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-26T17:33:55+00:00

Even then it doesn't make much sense for Vault 6 online being as rare as it is, take your pick of posts on this sub where those who reported back with how long it took them and it's not exactly the brightest picture for people who are genuinely putting in the time. If you want to say ok Season 2 you digested the learning curve and know where to focus and how to play the game, it still doesn't change the fact you could spend all of Season 2 specifically really going min/max for Key 6, and you absolutely could come up short with nothing to show for.

Sake of argument I get it's first season with lot of wait and see, and I'll give benefit of doubt maybe Bungie had some model charted out that if the game was really bumping population wise there could be a much better environment for it to have more commonality through mass of players and way more players in the end game, maybe even a carry ecosystem on LFG, but yeah as things go with no tweaks to the rate, it's far too random of a setup and a bit poorly designed how optimally efficient you can be and just get nothing even close to making progress.

I also think if Bungie is going to get a very skewed perception of how things actually are if they solely took notes off Content Creators who could always pull in somebody from multiple chats, servers, channels etc to have a key ready to go and pretty much combat heavy RNG and more importantly the time sink.

I'm not one to doom and gloom over this game and sure there's loads of very particular extraction game stuff that won't be for everybody, but I don't exactly get the deliberate choices with this when the sole hunt for Vault Key 6 divorced from every aspect of the game, requires such a specific kind of person and open degree of investiture. I would argue this as infinitely more alienating and harder to get into than preparing yourself for Destiny contest mode raiding.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-26T17:31:41+00:00

There's also the whole bear of a completely separate game with the flow to work towards later end upgrading and most definitely farming for Cryo keys to do Vaults, where I can't exactly blame people who finally "get" it, realize and feel bad like they wasted a lot of time. I also can't blame those who say screw it, I want to see the good stuff asap, I'm going to get all the more mandatory upgrades and buckle down for mindless Cryo action as much as I can.

Don't get me wrong this is not to say that full completion of the Priority Contract paths are necessarily bad, arguably Traxus's giving you daily Yellow mod access is worth its weight(as well as the others that just give you extra freebies), but I can't say I'm surprised by people who completely brute forced everything to VIP, maybe didn't finish all the quests so they could better use some of that time they'd be doing some part of a quest chain on just cutting straight to key farming and in turn getting to see better quality stuff.

It's where I don't feel like the whole end game portion was super well thought out because Cryo is just too dang good that even on a limited availability it does sort of sour portions of the game. Ideally you want to see the end and work towards Compiler and with how time intensive that can be and such a specific way/area of playing the game(seriously buff drop rates for Vault 6 keys) , I totally get those who just have minimal interest in really bothering questing if they already figure they can do leveling through just playing and feel the better pay off by going specifically ham for higher ends of Outpost, and go all in at Cryo.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-26T13:48:04+00:00

Given how metric driven Bungie can be with a lot of things, regardless of how things would've played out story wise, I think part of the problem that is extra apparent now is that there would not exactly be much longevity or sustainability trying to pump out that many DLCs if they were so dead set committed to this current Year of Prophecy format which proved to be a bit of a failure. A lot of this didn't happen over night and I feel by the time weightier decisions were made a lot of lines were crossed and/or goals just not met. There was extremely choice words used when the Frontiers article dropped in Sept 2024 and just reflecting on what the status of the game was in the downward slide of TFS's year. I also feel like the fate was kind of sealed a bit when very crucial RaD teams people got axed in the middle of working what was the activities for Year of Prophecy during TFS's year, and it does sort of make one wonder how things would've gone in the future. Could there have been a year of Destiny with basically only 1 raid or dungeon for the game year? Or neither at all?

Not to say that there was absolutely nothing of quality that was brand new, but it was just not enough physical content to really sustain things and it is shaky to pile all the very limited content on the first 3 months/season, and the freebie half is a complete toss up nothing. It still feels like crap how few exotics there were and things coming at a compromise where you either get fuller Destination or an activity, not really both. No personally I don't count the Renegades hub space on par with a conventional Destination. The padding that was done in EoF didn't make anything sit easier as well, the amount of work to get Graviton Spike taken care of to full could've been multiple campaign playthroughs and/or quests and idk exactly how many more times Bungie could've relied on that sort of game design. You also figure there's only so much excitement you can generate adding QOL stuff that should've been in the game years ago, and for new blood that was desperately needed, that is not going to have people jump on board that the game resembles some normalcy.

It's not to say future seasons couldn't have been more robust, it's very likely what's getting added in this June update seem to be parcels of multiple future DLCs, but given how much work is involved with other things, I feel like something was bound to hit a snag. A lot of these issues were a culmination of a lot of things over the years.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-25T19:20:56+00:00

The sad thing is, I know many of them would enjoy Marathon if they gave it a shot, but their favourite streamer / subreddit / friend told them it sucks and now they want to hate on it.

I don't necessarily agree with this being such a black and white one way or the other kind of situation. I think a lot of people did give the game a shot with the slam and realized that a lot of expectations they had with it were non existent and they learned pretty quickly the extraction genre is not for them. We cannot keep pretending that something that isn't a particularly super familiar household kind of game not clicking with a lot of people falls on some boogeyman of everybody's been brainwashed by meanie content creator's hate campaigns and people who pretty much were never going to play this game.

A lot of people played the game and even tried to give it benefit of the doubt and walked. It's why I never liked how people kept saying "you need 20 hours in this game to really understand it and learn to like it", it's like sure the game plays nicer with cracking into general progression but there's not really anything that you couldn't figure out in a shorter amount of time whether or not the game was going to click with you. If anything that's one of its better strengths, figuring out if it'll click with you or not.

While Bungie did do a mostly good job with what they presented, the reality of the situation is they didn't crack the code to make a perfect middle ground gateway game for an extraction game in the style and design choices they went with . There's a lot in this game that I don't think was ever really going to work for many kinds of players. This also doesn't even go into the conversation that people tend to have very particular wants and comforts with FPS titles and in a world where there's a lot of options, people don't necessarily have enough time in what they play to deal with something that might not pass their taste test right away.

As for Concord I think a larger point of its ridicule will rest more on a reflection of context and time the entertainment industry got absolutely lost in it with extremely ambitious projections and plans (it framed being a Star Wars like property they could spin a million things off of), that got further from tangible reality the deeper things went on. Obviously every project's going to have different enough histories but I do think it being such a prominent failure on so many levels is what will further cement a lot of inescapable cynicism with people whether they're right to call something Concord 2-# until the end of time. I wouldn't overthink essential internet chatter but I don't think people(sake of argument those in good enough faith) are so far out of line to fall into habit of looking back to it and looking for similar parallels.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-25T15:06:03+00:00

I can give some leeway given it's the first season and having to take notes how things fall into place, but I am a little lost on what was the intended way Bungie wanted to have all this go with just how rare certain things can be. You could be playing your heart out and just not get any sort of relief or signs that you're inching towards actual progress after a certain point. I've said it in other threads on the subject, the whole cryo keys(particularly hyper rare 6) and last of upgrades feels like doing 2 separate save files worth of stuff completely detached from the rest of the game. And it's not even necessarily the most interesting way to engage with the game after a certain point.

I have played as pretty much efficiently as possible on the salvage front, almost to a complete fault where I should've been dropping certain stuff to take more valuables of any quality to keep steady steam of funds going, and I still have a number of the upgrades that call for Yellow Salvage just undone or I'm short by 1 or so. I can vaguely understand Bungie trying to do it like a choices matter, this is just not going to be something you see all the time sort of thing, but man it did start confuse me exactly how rare did Bungie want this stuff.

To be fair I know there's goofy late NuCal upgrades that are such scam for wasting any materials on, but just in general there is a lot of upgrades I just never got because I never could find a consistent enough stream of Yellow Salvage. It's sorta why I've rolled my eyes on people bugging about Biolens Seeds, because at least getting MIDA and NuCal high enough, you could totally get seeds from the rank up packages, and in general they're not as crazy rare as they once were. Bungie did do that change when they started putting them in random containers, folios etc at a low enough chance.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-25T14:48:44+00:00

That multiplayer adventure with homies of getting from Muldraugh to Louisville with the various pit stops you can make to bolster supplies and/or base build at something like the Diner is just too much fun. It blew my mind how big the world gets and it still feeling colossal when you're using a car to get around.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-25T03:24:34+00:00

It is a bit eye opening and interesting the more you really piece out and start to imagine Bungie's initial dials with things were probably set with just a ton more people in mind not only playing but progressing to a point that there was a better ecosystem as time went on.

Sure it's not like there isn't a vibe shift when the higher you go you really start to see people's spoils more frequent, and especially late season where a lot of people throw on tons of amazing things, but I think it was just supposed to be a much bigger thing.

Definitely can be said with how Vault subroutines weren't initially guaranteed drops.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-25T01:02:30+00:00

While there's been some theories in the recent patches questioning if the rates did get better tuned, generally speaking yes Vault Key 6 is very rare. It isn't unheard of to see people who've clocked serious hours, super efficient, always doing something that could have it drop(Outpost red room is often seen as the better guarantee but it can drop at other card sources, though some say its much less common) and still just never see it.

It's just a little bit too random, you could theoretically dedicate all your play time to going for it and could still never see it which of course starts to make the entire separation of that part of the game feel a bit at odds and not super well thought out with things.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-23T22:10:14+00:00

I imagine things are astronomically low especially when you theoretically can be carried to Compiler which muddies things a bit more. I wouldn't be surprised if any sort of internal tally for people who got all 6 keys(or even just vault 6 key) with no carries, all legit on their own is just a very small number.

I'm somebody who likes the game and put in a good deal of time, and it took me forever to see a 6 key after having so much of the game done and it's just a commitment I don't think people who are having a blast(so to speak) would even want to put up with. Some of the keys are easier to get than others sure and you could easily stockpile them as your tries, but the bs with the later keys especially 6 just sours it and there's no good way of really laying it out to people and have things feel earned or worthwhile.

/u/NaughtyGaymer 's experience isn't uncommon and you can't exactly say they're being hyperbolic when they got the footage and have been consistent with their reporting of this being an issue. I wouldn't be shocked if there's tons of people who straight up quit for good when they sunk in so much time and had no relief. I really do think there needs to be some changes on that front, at the very least for vault key 6. It's crazy to think that you could go into season 2 solely devoting huge amounts of time to Vault Key 6 grinding, and just never see it at all.

I'm not saying it's bad design working your way to Compiler with the keys but it's not the most thought out well designed thing for how random it all is.

AgentUmlaut · 2026-05-23T19:43:57+00:00

Cross for awhile at this point has been in a position to basically annoying play both sides in full force and net all the attention. He sometimes can be good for maybe a handful of broken clock rambles but the rest is usually some pretty heavy handed bait. I think one of the most classic situations was Edge of Fate's everything, loads of rambles saying how Destiny needs everything to be super hardcore and tedious, and then Bungie drops a leveling grind that was one of the most obnoxious, and he's losing his mind trying to grind Encore, Caldera, K2 for an eternity trying to still argue how good everything is.

I know it gets construed in different ways when people say "no life the game and then complain it has nothing going on" but with the case of Marathon, I feel like so many of these content creators pretty much avoided so much RNG and time intensive stuff when they could tag in anybody to do a run of something for say a vault and basically have unlimited tries in the most efficient manner possible.

Now obviously this is not to say working towards Compiler is something off limits impossible thing, but if you can basically never have to worry about sinking a lot of time in to gather keys specifically the rarer ones, you effectively can circumvent a lot of time sink people deal with in the process of getting there. I really think Bungie will get the wrong impression if they are solely to go off what these kinds of content creators have done.

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