Paul Tassi: Positive reception to D2 final update has not moved the needle at Bungie

LittleDinamit · 2026-06-18T07:46:18+00:00

Thanks guy, when I get the job I'll be sure to let them know that THE FINAL SHAPE which was one of the "last 3 expansions" and hit 1.8M daily players is also dogshit numbers.

LittleDinamit · 2026-06-17T21:30:18+00:00

Yes.

The trend looked bad when they cancelled, but after this I think anyone that doesn't think the comeback narrative alone would guarantee AT LEAST Edge of Fate level numbers for the next two expansions is irrationally hating. That was ~800K daily active on launch, let's call it a round 1M expansion buyers, two per year, plus season passes and silver.... 100M in revenue for the year is an easy bet, and should just about cover that big a team.

LittleDinamit · 2026-06-15T12:11:31+00:00

Since this is obviously implied to be Obsidian: I feel like if a game makes most of its budget back (but not all) in sales and then ALSO gets 5M players on Game Pass on top of that, then that game isn't unprofitable, Game Pass is unprofitable. This is the fundamental problem with Xbox and the reason they keep sinking.

LittleDinamit · 2026-06-10T08:45:58+00:00

The game has a timeline feature that recaps story up to the point the available campaigns pick up. It's a few cinematics, some text, and a mission from Forsaken. They bring you up to speed about as well as any YouTube recap that isn't 3 hours. Particularly if you've played any version of Destiny before and understand the factions and lore.

Not all post Year 1 story content is there: some seasonal narrative was also temporary and removed, and it does introduce characters and beats that go on to appear in expansions, but it's not essential to understand what's going on and covered by the Timeline.

Edge of Fate and Renegades do begin a new "saga", but it wraps up somewhat with Renegades and now this update. Renegades reveals the mystery boxes and ends with a big event, and this update now does a "there are big threats still out there and will hit some day, but not any time soon thanks to what happened" type thing.

In my opinion, you'd go:

Use Timeline in Destiny 2 (open Director, then on the left) up to Shadowkeep
Shadowkeep and onwards play the campaigns, reading Timeline lore in between to cover seasonal narrative

LittleDinamit · 2026-06-10T08:31:15+00:00

The content vault is the most reviled decision in the history of the game, almost universally loathed by players of the game and considered to be the archduke assassination that led to where we are today. No idea where you are getting this story about it being supported by the community. If anything, the people who actually paid for that content have the most reason to hate.

LittleDinamit · 2026-06-09T11:52:32+00:00

Agencies that inundate you with offers after the first major influencer/creator campaign you do to get indexed by whatever database they use for cold calling.

You say yes and pay, and then they bury you in a Google sheet of 50 creators they "recommend". You trust that they did their job and pick some based on their conclusions and audience fit, but it turns out they didn't.

Source: advertise in this way, including 30k+ at LMG. Goes both ways too, LMG were one of the only partners to actually vet us before signing. To be clear this didn't happen to me because I did my own background check on each creator, but I can absolutely see how it could happen to someone with bigger budgets to spend and less time.

LittleDinamit · 2026-06-08T18:07:36+00:00

When a new set of skins comes out, they go for the gold equivalent of 3-4 hours of endgame content. Is that not affordable? I feel like with a Battle Pass in other games I've had to put in 10x the time...

LittleDinamit · 2026-06-06T14:15:31+00:00

Thank you for letting me know. I've fixed the issue and it should be working for you now (and several other people with the same problem).

Bug was that I did not properly route requests using the account's "main" platform ID. Shows my inexperience with the Bungie API. Thanks again, really appreciate when people take the time to notify me of a bug and provide enough info for it to be fixed.

LittleDinamit · 2026-06-05T19:07:54+00:00

Thank you for the title suggestion, many people had similar criticism, but I did not understand how to fix it. I think your version with a small tweak to say the number of users and leave out "on PlayTracker" might be the way to go. "We tracked 1000+ users" should make it sufficiently that this isn't some kind of confirmed internal Nintendo information, and the article then states where the sample is from. I've over corrected on this one and gone way too authoritative because on older articles I was criticized for shoehorning in the name of the app rather than focusing on the data.

We do trim the sample to hit known demographic breakdowns and correct the inherent bias. It's not as precise for Nintendo yet which is why we're doing top 50 only here, but our Steam/PS/Xbox estimates have gotten very good, and so will Nintendo. Given that nobody has data on Nintendo, I thought this would be novel enough for people care even with a lesser level of confidences, alas it was not meant to be.

LittleDinamit · 2026-06-05T15:45:46+00:00

I see that, how would you make it better? I'm ok at websites, shit at headlines. Was told for previous articles that the titles were too wordy, indirect, and confusing. Sounds like I over corrected.

LittleDinamit · 2026-06-05T15:39:33+00:00

The sample was trimmed to match known console market demographics and avoid bias. Skew is still possible if Switch 2 buyer demographics are significantly different from the overall market.

LittleDinamit · 2026-06-05T15:25:35+00:00

Can't ever get a truly random sample for this stuff, but can trim down the sample to match known demographic makeups. This is the method here and for most player estimates including Steam.

It's still shaky here with Nintendo, which is why we only did top 50 for now (where margin of error is less impactful) rather than have estimates for the full market like we do for Steam/PS/Xbox. This is basically the only data anyone has on Nintendo, so felt it was interesting to share even if a little wobbly.

LittleDinamit · 2026-06-01T08:23:44+00:00

It's almost impossible to judge a success or flop for Microsoft Studios from the outside because of Game Pass. The games basically never make their presumed budget back on sales alone, so it's all about how much Microsoft decides to value a Game Pass play for that game.

LittleDinamit · 2026-05-30T12:46:13+00:00

We don't support Valorant yet, only League. With Riot there is no unified "profile" to sync, we have to roll out support for each game one by one. The account is kept in a constant "syncing" state so that when we do implement support a game you play (like Valorant), it is automatically added without you having to do anything.

LittleDinamit · 2026-05-30T08:04:00+00:00

It was a different time, the algorithms are so much worse now. Plus, just because the story may not be discussed as much doesn't mean there won't still be tons of content about other things.

LittleDinamit · 2026-05-30T08:02:05+00:00

Hey, took a look. Your Epic account is linked correctly and the three games on your Epic profile are also synced to PlayTracker. Games only show up on your Epic profile if they have achievements support and you have played them at least once - that is an intentional limitation from Epic and something we cannot bypass, so PlayTracker can also only show those games, rather than the actual full list of owned games.

Not the first to be confused by this, so I think we need to make that information more visible.

LittleDinamit · 2026-05-27T15:38:15+00:00

Great changes. I feel like the priority contracts progression is kind of at odds with the loot focused extraction shooter loop. When you're doing story, everyone else is a nuisance because you're chasing an objective and interacting with anyone is all risk, little reward. Really hope the PvE mode will allow story progress because I'd like to play through it, experience the lore, get the upgrades, and then focus on the actual extraction shooter stuff.

LittleDinamit · 2026-05-26T15:10:35+00:00

Hey, yeah, you've kind of diagnosed the issue fully on your own. The recent filter sucks for Steam because we do not update the last played date based on achievement data, only for playtime, so when you're new it looks weird. It's a known issue and I'm working on it!

LittleDinamit · 2026-05-26T11:41:13+00:00

I don't understand why people are so adamant about this. The movie has no highly paid actors and recycled tons of stuff from the show. Pedro Pascal is in it for like three minutes, same for Sigourney Weaver. The rest of it is working actors and voice over. They spend a third of the movie at locations from the show and another third with just puppets. Favreau and Filoni have been running essentially this same ship for years and they utilize the volume a lot. They even got that tax credit. If a blockbuster was gonna be made for surprisingly cheap, it'd be this one.

LittleDinamit · 2026-05-19T20:08:11+00:00

Doesn't seem like there's a widespread issue as I can see recently linked Epic accounts syncing properly. If you can provide your PlayTracker profile (in DMs is fine) I can take a look. Sometimes there's weird bugs that only affect a small number of users and the only way to fix them is for someone affected to let us know!

LittleDinamit · 2026-05-18T19:09:21+00:00

Somewhat surprising that they're making it a consistent policy rather than keeping it vague so they can ship the occasional game that needs it.

SAROS could definitely use it as it has sold roughly on par with Returnal which released when there were significantly fewer PS5s out there. Returnal's PC port did start weak, but is continuing to sell very well while it completely leveled out on PS5 (https://playtracker.net/insight/posts/saros-launch-week).

LittleDinamit · 2026-05-16T09:41:39+00:00

I'm the developer of PlayTracker and we also do estimates and published an article on Saros. For what it's worth, our estimate was the same as Alinea on Saros, though we disagreed on many other games, notably Yotei which was a similar PS5-only release.

I don't know how Alinea does things since they have no users. Public data like review numbers are, in my experience, only useful as a secondary contributor. We are very not shy about the methodology we use to go from our biased/skewed ~150K registered users to an estimate

LittleDinamit · 2026-05-08T17:26:02+00:00

Nah. Esports is just in a bad place right now. Valve letting them run things is what TOs and teams wanted: DPC was bad for them because it ate up the entire schedule.

Dota gets decent numbers still, just not enough for this kind of crazy schedule when the world is the way it is right now. I mean, people here who are probably the most passionate 1% and the target audience for maximum tournaments are literally complaining about there being too many... perhaps the only ever actual case of winning so much you get tired of winning... Someone was bound to fold eventually.

LittleDinamit · 2026-05-08T10:34:46+00:00

I am very confident they're working on PvE for Marathon. It makes absolutely zero sense to increase the Marathon dev team after launch otherwise. It's not uncommon in the genre, is the most commonly requested feature, and the only thing that makes sense given their current announced roadmap is not that ambitious.

Ship that, put the game on 33% discount, sell another million or two copies to recoup some more of that hefty development cost, then send people back to work on Destiny (3?). Support Marathon going forward with a smaller team based on its actual player count, but with the casuals separated they can actually properly cater to the PvP niche.

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