It has been months now, but Destiny 2 players still can’t believe the game has ended its run with no more content being produced after nine years, or 12 for the full history of the franchise. But what has happened since? Players have continued to play regardless of there not being any new content, regardless of the fact that everyone knows the game will never add more. Now, it’s putting up some surprising figures.
As it stands, Destiny 2’s playercount is matching ARC Raiders, with both putting up around 30,000 concurrents a night. ARC Raiders, released in October 2025, went viral and blew past expectations with 481,000 concurrents near launch, far above even Destiny 2’s all-time high of 316,000.
It’s also notable that until very recently, which was the launch of Helldivers 2’s update, Devoid of Liberty, Destiny 2’s nightly numbers were almost even with that game as well. Higher, likely, give that Helldivers 2 has a majority PC playerbase and Destiny 2 has a majority console one. ARC Raiders hasn’t published its own PC/console split.
These figures also say something about the precipitous fall of ARC in addition to the resilience of Destiny 2. No ARC Raiders updates have moved the needle in terms of reversing playercount loss. ARC may increase today with a live update, 1.42.0, but its next big content addition is in October.
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Destiny 2, of course, has no more updates, so it stands to reason these numbers can’t help but decline further. But the fact that they’re still this high, which is the highest baseline figures the game has had since 2025, shows players still want to play, even if nothing new is coming. Fans still believe that Sony made an enormous mistake killing off Destiny 2 entirely, but there have been zero signs of reversal there, especially after almost all Destiny devs were laid off in a massive purge.
There is, of course, another game that is compared to both Destiny 2, its Bungie rival, and ARC Raiders, its extraction shooter rival. That is Marathon, peaking around 4,000 a night now on Steam, 6x less than both of those, despite its release just five months ago. The game has shown no signs of discontinuing content updates, and the entire situation has understandably frustrated Destiny fans. There is, however, the reality of the cost of production to be noted, with Destiny 2 being a far more expensive game to maintain and it has constantly incurred losses. Though it is difficult to imagine Marathon is turning a profit at all with these dangerously low numbers (this is also with a 2:1 split on Steam versus console).
The point, however, is that Destiny still lives. Players are currently digging through files to pull out vaulted content in “Project Sunrise,” a cool new venture that, for now, Bungie and Sony seem content to ignore. If they won’t make new content, fine, players will make their own, pulling from the past.
Destiny is dead, but its ghost lives on, haunting those who killed it.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
