Destiny 2 reached its highest number of players in the months leading up to the final update

Bungie has confirmed that the studio will leave Destiny 2 after the next update to focus on Marathon. This has led to a surge in players in the sequel, either as people returning to say goodbye, or perhaps as a message to Bungie that there is still life in Destiny 2.

Destiny 2's player base is on the rise

While it's hard to determine how many people played Destiny 2 on PS5 and Xbox Series X over the weekend, Bungie's game was just shy of reaching 19,000 concurrent players on Steam, according to SteamDB. That's the highest number of players Destiny 2 has reached on the platform since it dipped below 20,000 on February 2 and stayed there.

It was the first weekend since the announcement that the Destiny 2 update was coming to an end, so an increase in player numbers was expected. What will be interesting now is not just whether this slightly increased player count can be sustained – hovering around 20,000 won't be enough to make Bungie change its mind – but whether it continues to climb between now and the game's latest update.

Even the end of its updates won't bring 300,000 players back to Destiny 2

The days of attracting more than 300,000 players at once are long gone. However, less than a year ago there were over 100,000 of you playing Destiny 2 on one platform for The Edge of Fate update, and over 70,000 six months ago when The Dawning update was released. These numbers really show how quickly interest in Destiny 2 fell off a cliff, and perhaps justify Bungie's decision to move on and focus on Marathon.

Or at least they would if Marathon came close to reaching the lofty heights that Destiny 2 once achieved. Not only did Marathon never even come close to topping Destiny 2 on Steam — it hit 88,000 concurrent players when it launched — but right now, the game Bungie is going to focus all of its efforts on has fewer people playing it than the one it decided to leave behind.

Even at this stage, nothing more than the Marathon is apparently planned. The end of Destiny 2 updates is believed to be accompanied by significant layoffs at the studio, as the team has no other new project to work on. Destiny 3 hasn't been greenlit, and while Bungie is reportedly pitching projects for PlayStation, none have been approved.