How is Destiny 2 doing on consoles?

I expect the PC community to be going strong since the game came out a few weeks ago but what about on PS4 and Xbox One? I know they removed the player count on the Destiny tracker third party website because it was ''spreading a false narrative about the state of the game'' or whatever. Did some other website pick up the slack? Is there any way to look at player count in PvP or PvE out there? What's the word on LFG for Nightfall and Raid groups? Basically: how is the game doing relative to Destiny 1 and its expansions? I know it sold better but is the player dropoff in % the same? Lower? Higher?

Looking at my Destiny clan it should be higher (we dropped Destiny 2 sooner than any Destiny 1 content) but maybe we're just outliers. What about you guys? How are the GB clans on consoles?

I can only talk about my personal experience since I do not know a reliable statistic for this. I do know the reason that Destinytracker took their stats offline was because people were indeed building false narratives. They were claiming that 70% of players had dropped off the game, or something like that. But they used a statistic of unique concurrent users on a single day (and a monday at that, projecting it against a sunday of the week prior). You're going to get less people on a monday than a sunday first and foremost. But also, when the game first launches literally everyone boots it up every single day. At some point, people will not boot it up every day, but only every few days. They are still playing, but they aren't reflected in that statistic. What they said was 70%, could have been only 10% for example.

From my own experience, I see way, way, way, way, way more LFG posts on LFG sites than I did in Rise of Iron after this same amount of time for Trials. I only look for Trials though, so I have no idea about Raids and Nightfalls. I recently cleared around 30% of my clan of inactive users, but the others are still playing.

The last statistic I overheard was from the Destiny Community Podcast, specifically from Tefty. I do not know where he got these statistics and I do not know if they are accurate. But he claims during Age of Triumph, Destiny had around 400.000 players and claims that D2 at this very moment has around 2 million.

Again, I did not fact check that, but my own experience makes me think it could be accurate since I couldn't find anyone for Trials in Age of Triumph except super-sweats (and those posts were usually 20 min old too) and right now there is a new post every 20 seconds.

@zevvion: That was not true at the launch of Age of Triumph at all honestly (unless he was talking about June-August Age of Triumph, which would be odd, as that launched on March 28th, basically 2-3 months prior, and after Destiny 2 was already talked about and in Beta on Consoles, and yeah, I'm sure numbers were awful during that time period). I remember seeing numbers in the 800-900k range for PvE on DestinyTracker during that time period, even though that still pales in comparison to Destiny 2 now (it was a free update to a DLC for a 3 year old game). Destinytracker.com, if you look at it right now shows 1.7m PvE players (on all 3 Platforms, many of which are likely, at least based on our Community alone from Discord, PC players, and very few Xbox One Players). That number has been sitting around there (between 1.75-2.25) since before the PC launched, so unless zero players jumped into the PC version, console numbers have been dropping significantly. Though there would be some serious validity to the argument that all players don't log in everyday, so I'd love to see a Unique user stat for every week since launch, I think those numbers would be much more accurate and telling of how the Community Population is doing for Destiny. A better stat to look at the whole weekend of who participates in activities is each weekend's TrialsReport numbers, which this weeks are only at 347,553 and it's pretty pathetic, especially when that includes another Platform (though I'm not positive this has everything to do with the playerbase, but rather the 2 weeks off, the removal of Mercy, and the sad state of the current Crucible). It's getting pretty obvious Destiny 2's Crucible is not as much fun as Destiny 1's to the vast majority of the Destiny Community, which is sad, because Trails and Crucible are what kept Destiny alive for most of it's life cycle. To put how bad that 347k number is for Trials into perspective, Destiny 1 didn't have that low of numbers outside of the June-August timeframes ever, and that was only on 2 Platforms and when currently PC Players are still currently trying to gear up, and a Trials Flawless is still the number 1 way to get Power Levels up in Destiny 2. It's a very sad state of affairs. Hopefully some changes they make on December 5th will bring more people back, because Destiny is hurting right now. While Destiny 2 has seemingly higher retention numbers than Destiny did in Vanilla, it seems to be worse than any of the other Content launches since Vanilla Destiny. I think a lot of those player retention numbers going back up depends heavily on how good Curse of Osiris is, hopefully we will get a good peak at that this week, and hopefully it will bring players back in droves. I think the vast majority of the players actually enjoy Destiny 2, rather than where Destiny 1 was sitting at this same time period, but we are bored, and Bungie needs to fix that quickly.

@hestilllives19: I don't think that is true. If you take the numbers from Destinytracker, D2 has higher numbers than both Rise of Iron and Age of Triumph did. Not just higher, but much higher. Age of Triumph had 1.4 million people at its peak and 400.000 after two months. Destiny 2 had 4+ million players at its peak and 2 million after two months.

I can't look as far back as Taken King, but it wouldn't have been much more than D2 numbers. The fact is that D2 has serious issues for no-lifers such as myself and other no-lifers are upset that the game isn't failing because of it. The whole narrative that Reddit tries to push that D2 is a dead game is just either what I said in my previous sentence or they are thoroughly uninformed.

D2 was basically top 5 in sales for the whole, entire year. Internet forums always think they're part of the majority way more than they think they are, when they're at most maaaaybe 5% of sales.

@taesoawful: that doesn't tell us anything about how many people are actively playing the game. Bungie and Activision are selling this game as a service. If it's losing active users faster than any other Destiny 1 content outside of vanilla I wouldn't call that a success. I'm sure if, like Hestillives said, their hardcore PvP comunity is basically close to its lowest point in 3 years I wouldn't call that a success. I'm just looking for a sense of how people are actually responding to the game outside of Internet forums. If they're responding poorly everywhere there's a chance this game gets fixed in the expansion next fall.

The 4 people that I raid with in my current clan are the only ones constantly trying to raid. The rest of clan either now plays Fortnite Battle Royale on ps4 or a small number who play D2 on pc.

Looking at communities on ps4; there are way less people posting about raiding or trials. I see a higher number of people posting to do the prestige raid, but it's way less posts in general. The one community that has 55,000 followers used to have at least 30 posts a min looking for whatever, now it's down to like 10.

Don't know if that helps but it certainly feels like the player count has dropped faster than D1. Especially for it only being 2 months since launch. At this point in D1, I was still grinding for helium filaments on the moon.

@pyrodactyl: From my experience, people dropped off Rise of Iron the quickest. That is if we're just doing actual paid content releases, otherwise it would be Age of Triumph. After a good month, it was impossible for someone like me to find a group to do Trials with during the latter, as the absolute lowest I could find was people asking for 1.7 KD's and those posts were 20+ minutes old. For Rise of Iron, it took me about 2,5 months to be unable to run. I could only do it if my friends were online, otherwise, no show. We are a little over 2 months into D2 right now and I can find groups to play with without trying. There are new posts on destinylfg every 20 seconds.

I only lost 30% of my clan after two months. By contrast, all except my regular raid group dropped off Rise of Iron after a single month. Which is very unfortunate, because I still think Rise of Iron is the most fun Destiny there ever was, including Destiny 2. I would have loved to be more active during that time, but it just wasn't possible to do Raids without doing LFG, and two bad experiences into that, I was done with that too.

Of course none of this is useful data to determine what the actual statistics are, but since you're asking for anecdotes, there is mine.

@zevvion: What part of what I said isn't true? All I was saying is the 400k number Tefty was throwing around I know is BS. I look at DestinyTracker pretty darn frequently, because honestly I was always concerned about trying to get to 50 DTR in Trials, which never happened, I always hit 49 1/2, it got sweaty due to low population and I dropped back down. Never once did I say D2 didn't have higher numbers than both Rise of Iron and Age of Triumph, I actually quite blantently said D2 did have higher numbers than Age of Triumph right now compared to AoT's height of 800-900k since it's at about 1.7m. The thing is, Destiny 2 was at around 3.8m active daily users on a consistent basis for the first month after launch, so the game has lost roughly 2 million active daily users, after coming out on another Platform, which isn't really a good thing. If we are talking sales, we know it has sold roughly 5.5-6.5 million on Consoles, the lion's share of that being on PS4. PC sales are really tricky, we have no clue, but if I had to guess, it's somewhere around the 1.25-2.25m mark. That is a truckload of sales, between 6.75-8.75m units (I can pretty much guarantee it will fall somewhere between there when we see those actual numbers in January or so, since right now all we have is pretty much hearsay based on rumor, conjecture, and stat tracking). What I'm saying is that while sales were good, retention rates of players have been plummeting, although not as much as Vanilla Destiny, it is still very worrisome, because its more than basically every other DLC sales retention rates Destiny has ever had. I totally get that some of that is natural and just how games work, and that players who buy DLC stick around better, but having about a 60% daily retention rate fall to around 25% isn't a good thing from Month 1 to Month 2 of a game like Destiny. At this rate, each DLC is going to be lucky if over 40% of players purchase and play it. I hope they do, but Bungie has a lot of work to do for December 5th, that's all I'm saying.

@hestilllives19: I should have quoted the specific part you said I think isn't true. I caused some confusion there. I was referring to this part:

Hopefully some changes they make on December 5th will bring more people back, because Destiny is hurting right now. While Destiny 2 has seemingly higher retention numbers than Destiny did in Vanilla, it seems to be worse than any of the other Content launches since Vanilla Destiny.

If we take the Destinytracker numbers - which aren't accurate for conclusions about the total population, but so long as we use them for both cases they can tell us at least something - then we know that Rise of Iron and Age of Triumph both had lower numbers than Destiny 2 does. They took the entire thing offline as far as I know, but the quotes can still be found. The 400.000 number Tefty was referring to was two months after Age of Triumph came out. At its peak it was reported 1.4 million.

I'm not sure what part of what you said I am misunderstanding. You're saying it has higher retention numbers but it is worse than other content launches? But at the same time you're telling me now you think more people dropped off D2 than they did other Destiny releases, which is the opposite of higher retention numbers.

My question to you is, how sure are we that seeing the numbers that Destinytracker used to post go down is even a problem? The lifeblood of any game is and always has been the casual masses. They are never going to play a game for 2+ months. They go from game to game. I bought Titanfall 2. I played that game's PvP for a week. It's not a bad game, in fact I think it's the best shooter campaign I've ever played. I'm just not the hardcore audience for that game.

I bet any game works like that, with the possible exception of Call of Duty. But that is more a unique case than a standard. If we look up numbers for Diablo III, Titanfall and others, are you sure we're not going to see a very similar trend as far as numbers go? I don't claim to have looked up the answer, but I bet so. Retaining more than half of your initial playerbase is just never going to happen because most people are just not interested in playing a single game every day for months on end, no matter how good it is.

Those casual masses dont support the game in the long run anyway. That is why you need the more hardcore players to keep the lights burning during the empty spells when it comes to new content. Then again the problems that destiny 2 has have nothing to do with casual vs. hardcore players. The real problem is that they have streamlined the endgame so much that it has lost much of what kept players doing those endgame activities like strikes, raids, events and so on.

With the way that gear is handed out in Destiny 2 there is no point in doing anything else than the weekly milestones after a certain gear score since all the loot that drops from any activity is basically a few gear scores lower than what you currently have on. So my current destiny 2 routine is to log in once a week and do 1 milestone for all my chars. There is no excitement in doing events or raids since I cant get anything better out of them unless I have a milestone going on that encourages me to do that stuff.

Also for some reason there are no heroic strikes in destiny 2 or heroic lost sectors. It is all just basic vanilla stuff with very predictable end results in the way of the rewards. There is also far less variety in loot. So you basically just upgrade the weapons that you like most.

@zevvion: you keep going back to absolute numbers. Of course Destiny 2 has higher numbers than lackluster recycled content for a 3 year old game. Lives' numbers are really telling. Destiny 2 just came out on PC but overall population is sharply on the decline (in terms of %). If those numbers are correct I'm not sure why you would want to argue against them. If Bungie cares about these metrics it will only push them to make the game better like Taken King got better after people trashed on Vanilla.

That's what we all want right? More fleshed out end game, good PvP, etc. Then again, they would probably oversell and lie about the "improvements" instead of delivering on the potential of the franchise. It's what they've done in the last 3 years and I don't think they'll change their approach until they feel threatened by a competitor.

@pyrodactyl: Destiny 2 has been built for a broader audience who were always going to drop the game much quicker, but if more folks come back for the DLC Curse of Osiris then that's job done for Bungie we're not going to see any meaningful changes until then.

Even then I'm not sure anything will change Destiny 2 sold fewer copies but earned more revenue most likely due to fans buying the game + season pass, Destiny 2 might just have higher peaks and lower low's compared to D1.

@zevvion: I wrote Zev a Novel, so for anyone else, you can just skip down to the DLDR if you want. Just to clarify, Destiny 1 sold a lot of copies, something like 12.85 million copies of the base game (VGChartz should be relatively accurate), and I think most of that was within the launch window before The Dark Below, since most new players would have bought the Collections in later releases if they didn't own anything yet (The Taken King sold another 3.97 million copies, and Rise of Iron another 930k copies, keep in mind this doesn't include separate DLC purchases or likely digital sales, and I'm just realizing Destiny 1 sold a whopping 17.75 million unique copies in it's 3 years, that's nuts). Like all games, for whatever reason I'll never understand, about 60% of those players never even finished the story and were never heard from again (based on PS4 trophy data, 40% never even finished Earth and did the Septiks Strike, and only 38.6% of players reached Vanguard Rank 1 and if you didn't do that, you didn't play past the campaign), but that's pretty typical of games in general. Another 20% got very pissed off that Destiny wasn't the game they wanted it to be, and for the most part rightfully so at launch of vanilla (of this group probably only a quarter of them ever even finished Vault of Glass and then left the game for good, I know many players who did exactly this), and that Raid Completion rate is only at 21.6%. We also know that 15% of players finished a Hard Raid, though keep in mind also this is any D1 Raid and not just Vault of Glass, so this is probably on the high side. It is very likely that it is this 15% that stuck around and bought The Dark Below and House of Wolves (I wish Dark Below had trophies that I could pull exact data from), but lets just use the Normal Raid completion as our Retention Stat. So your talking about a population of Destiny of around 2.76 million of that 12.85 million players. As far as daily retention rates, I don't think those numbers would be possible to find or estimate at this point, so from this point on I'll be referring to retention rates by how much of the community completed the normal and hard raids, since we have actual data for that (see below for how this correlates in Destiny 2 to our actual Daily active users).

So the Taken King comes around and rejuvenates Destiny. Even players who hated Destiny like Jeff really enjoyed it. Like I mentioned earlier it sells another 3.97 million copies of the game, not including DLC downloads which were easily in the 2.5-3 million range. Again, based on Trophy data we know that 27.1% of players finished The Taken King Quest (basically the DLC's story, and this is about 4.5 million players), that's of the now 16.82 million Destiny 2 players, which in all honestly is pretty amazing. Of that group though, only 9.4% finished King's Fall and 5.7% on Heroic. So again our retention audience is probably around 950k players, but may have been higher. There were a lot of players back then who didn't finish Heroic King's Fall but kept playing Trials. So this number could easily have been somewhere between 950k-1.58m. So that's a retention rate between 13.5-22.6% (based on 7 million users). It's does seem to be a bit higher than Vanilla though as we know a lot higher % of players finished the campaign, around 65% compared to 40%.

Last comes Rise of Iron which sold another 930k physical copies, and likely sold another 2 million or so downloads, so the total Rise of Iron population is down to around 3 million players at the most. Completion rate of the Rise of Iron Quest was at 14.7% (16.2% finished the first mission, or 2.87 million players), or 2.61 million of the now 17.75 million Destiny players. Wrath completion rates are at 5.3% and 3%, or 940k and 533k. So again, our player retention rates 87% for Campaign completion and between 17.8-31%.

Granted these are DLC's that were sold to more dedicated portions of the playerbase, but it's pretty obvious my assumptions were correct that player retention was much higher for the DLC's than Vanilla Destiny. Now lets compare that to what we know, empirically of Destiny 2. Destiny 2 was the Best selling game in 2017, before it released on PC, and before COD WWII launched. We also know from that same NPD release that it has only been outsold by COD: Infinite Warfare and Battlefield 1. So we know, at that time, Destiny 2 had sold less than 12.5 million which is what both of those games have sold roughly. The real problem is we don't know that bottom line of the 4th best game. They don't seem to be including either Fifa 17 or Uncharted 4, as those are the only two other real big hitters within the 12 month window previous to Destiny 2's release, and it's mainly obvious since Fifa 17 sold better than both COD: IW and Battlefield 1 and they claimed those two as game 1 and 2 in the comparison so it's likely they were talking about releases in the past 12 months from the report. So we really know is that Destiny 2 is doing well but not quite as well as Vanilla Destiny did at 12.85 million units sold. We do know it is for sure at least 5 million, since Trials of the Nine participation in Week 2 was at 1.07 million players and 21.7% of players have obtained the Trophy for going to the Third Spire for at least 1 win, and it's very likely Week 1 was much higher than that. We can also guess via Destinytracker that it's at least close to if not above the 6.9 million players they track individually, but outside of those, we don't really know at all how much Destiny 2 has sold. Of those X number of sales, we do know that a crazy 81.9% of those players beat the Campaign (or at least made it to Level 20) via Trophy data, but only 20.4% of those players have completed Leviathan Normal (or 1.4 million of our 6.9 million guesstimated userbase). For Destiny 2 we do know the retention rates of players due to Destinytracker, and that is that we had about 3.85 million active daily users a month ago, or 1 month in, and now are around 1.5-1.7 depending on the day (yesterday was 1.5m). So 2 months out, we are barely hovering above that guess of 1.4 million players who completed the Raid who still login everyday. So it's probably safe to assume those Normal Raid retention rates earlier were also off by about 20%. So lets run those guesstimated numbers. Destiny 2 is at about 24.6%, Vanilla Destiny at 25.92%, The Taken King at 27%, and Rise of Iron at 37.6%. Keep in mind that Vanilla Destiny stat is inflated since it's based on Raid Completions and include completions of any D1 Raid, not just during the Vanilla launch window (so that's the only one of those 4 stats I wouldn't consider to be very valid estimation of active daily users during those time periods, but since we don't really have any other frame of reference that I know of, I kept it).

DLDR: Now, this is a whole lot of information (see the last two sentences above this for the summation of all of that if you didn't read it), and guess work based on information we just don't know or have too little actual facts about, but my assertion that retention rates of Destiny 2 when compared to The Taken King and Rise of Iron being lower seems to be accurate as far as I can tell. Surprisingly only Rise of Iron had a higher Campaign completion rate, though that makes a lot of sense from the design choices Bungie made with Destiny 2. Now the bigger question is, how big of a deal is the drop from 3.85 million to 1.7 million Active Daily Users month over month from 1 month out to 2 months out. I don't know. How bad is it that we are currently sitting at under 25% of Users that still play? It certainly doesn't look great. I think ideally you want numbers around where they were for Rise of Iron, just shy of 40%, but I don't know if that is even feasible on an actual release. I do know that Destiny 2 had extremely high early retention rates, around 55.8% in the first month after release, so a lot of the playerbase really enjoyed it. IMO, Bungie needs to find a way to get that back somewhere between the current 24.6% and that 55.8%, and if they can do that, the game will be in great shape. If they can't, they probably won't sell much DLC for Destiny 2 throughout it's lifetime, and since the base numbers seem to be down for the Destiny 2 when compared to Destiny, that isn't a good thing. I really hope we see great things from Curse of Osiris tomorrow. One thing I'd like to note after looking at all of this is how eerily similar Destiny 2's metrics look to exactly where we were at with The Taken King. The game looks to, at least right now, retained pretty much all of The Taken King players, and nobody else (so it's possible those other 5 million players are gone for good, 3.6 million of which were on PS3/X360). That's kind of weird...

Side Note: Comparing Active Daily Users 2 months out from a free update like Age of Triumph to a DLC of a game in it's 3rd Year, after it's number sequel has not only been announced, talked about in detail, but is also currently in Beta, and that free Update also happens to have the literal worst PvP Meta of the entire 3 year life cycle of the original game... to Destiny 2 two months... please tell me you see how that is an absurd comparison.

@pyrodactyl: Because if the numbers are correct, a higher percentage of players is still playing D2 than people were playing any year 3 content. It's not just absolute numbers, it's also relative.

@hestilllives19 No offense lives, but you're using the same logic that got destinytracker to shut down their service. You using inaccurate numbers and I count at least five assumptions that you're making, each of which can be wrong.

For all we know, literally every single person that bought D2 is still playing it. Your numbers don't actually show how many stopped playing, you're just assuming that, which is the entire reason why destinytracker shut their stuff down.

@zevvion: Destinytracker didn't shut it down though totally, they shut down the Daily Population Chart around Oct. 18th. They basically just shut down the tracker that point blank showed that steep decline.

I can literally look up every single day how many people are tracked still though (Note: It was only 1.2 million yesterday, so 1.5 million Sunday, and 1.7 million Saturday). What I do agree with is that it would be better if they did track Weekly Unique users rather than Daily, just like TrialsReport does. But lets be honest here, do we really think those Daily numbers going from 3.85 million Daily to 1.2-1.7 million isn't a decent picture of how many players have dropped off? I know the number of Active Weekly users is likely higher than both of those numbers, but looking at Trials, Trials of the Nine went from Week 2 of 1.07 million players (while population was hovering at just over 3 million, see Sept 22-25 above) to 382,747 (when the population of daily users is around 1.2-1.7 million players). And those numbers are tracking every single unique user for the entire weekend that played (and probably the most interesting statistic there is that 34.4% of Trials Players were on PC, and 40.7% were PS4, leaving X1 only at 24.9%). Had we not had two weeks off from Trials I would bet that number would hit closer to 500k, but it doesn't change the fact that numbers for Destiny 2 over the past month, only 2 months after release have went from dropping 26% in Month 1, to dropping another 30% of the Active Playerbase before even the end of Month 2. We are only at about 44% of the Active Playerbase anymore, which is kind of crazy considering an entire Platform just launched 3 weeks ago. So basically in the 3 weeks since PC launched, the exact same amount of Console players stopped logging in everyday as PC players joined and are now Active Daily users. Notice how Oct. 18th had already dropped to that 1.7-1.8 million range. And if the usage statistics from this past weekend's Trials coorelate to actual Player Populations, and PC makes up 34.4%, or roughly 1/3 of the overall Destiny 2 Active Playerbase, something I think seems reasonable, that means of that 1.7ish million players, around 600k are PC Players, which also means Daily Active Console players has dropped another 600k and is down to around 1.1 Million rather than 1.7 million of that 3.85 Million in the first 2 weeks. That means only 28.6% of those players remain 2.5 months after release.

As far as making assumptions goes, I know I am. I'm claiming as much. But we are limited on the data we are given. If I had data that eliminated these assumptions I would use that, but that Data doesn't exist. The thing is the assumptions I'm making are extremely logical and very likely not far off the mark. There is little doubt that the Destiny 2 Population is dwindling. My friends list is barren everytime I log in, and I've seen you claim as much, same with our Clans. This isn't just an us problem, it's a Destiny wide problem. In both my personal frame of reference and according to any and all the statistical metrics I could find for Destiny 2, this is without a doubt a true statement. I also don't see you want to ignore this is a very real problem, and one that hopefully Bungie is able to mitigate by fixing the issues players are frustrated with, mainly nothing to do anymore. I love the Destiny franchise and want nothing but good things for it, and that starts first and foremost with Bungie solving the issues making players leave the game and go somewhere else. I'm about as hardcore of a Destiny player out there, who has purchased the game on 2 Platforms, and I still haven't put 200 hours into it yet. That's insane to me.

I would be thoroughly surprised if that 2 million figure is accurate, if you count number-bumping technicalities as inaccuracy. The game is so new that they could count every player who has logged in since launch as active, and seem to be doing so based on those numbers. I remember a LOT of people playing Destiny at launch (and being disappointed), and I can't find a single person I know actually playing Destiny 2 actively right now - though they at least tried it, and really wanted it to be what everyone dreamed Destiny 1 would even be.

@zombievac: To be honest, the sentiment you type at the end is the exact same one that D1 has had for 3 full years. It isn't really meaningful when trying to determine whether or not D2 has as many people playing it as D1 did. D1 still had tons of people playing it despite disappointment and D2 has as well.

I guess I could leave it at this: I care about playing with my friends, whom still play. I care about doing the Raid, which I still do about twice per week. I care most about Trials, for which I have the least amount of issue finding people to play with (after I broke certain elo that is) in Destiny's entire lifespan.

It could well be true that Destiny 2 is sorely disappointing in active playerbase numbers, I am not claiming it absolutely is not the case. What I am claiming is that no statistic here accurately shows that, which is correct. Which just leaves personal experience that I described above. If we really want to know, we would have to wait or ask for Activision to publish the numbers.

@zevvion:Why would you compare end of year 3 to the launch of Destiny 2. Destiny 1 was at the end of its rope by that point. The most accurate comparison would be if we could compare Destiny 2 to The Taken King. See if the player dropoffs in % are similar. I'm sure they aren't. I remember playing trials until the end of the year back then. This time around I tried seriously maybe 3 weeks and made like 2 other lackluster attempts. This game barely lasted me a month. Destiny 2 is the Destiny content I've played the least and that includes DLC with very little content. I'm sure I'm not alone in that situation. @hestilllives19 is basically in the same boat and he's the biggest Destiny fanatic I know.

I liked D2 a lot more than D1 at their respective launches, after about 4 weeks I was pretty done and so was everyone I was playing with.

I put in at least 80+ hours and had a good time but it just doesn't have legs but it took me A LOT longer to get to that point than it did with D1. It has been really interesting to watch my friends who were Destiny 1 Die-Hards fall off so quickly.

One of their biggest mistakes is not utilizing the story missions and side missions for content, some of those side missions are fantastic but no one does them, it's hours of meaningless content because of how they built the game.

@zombievac: That's not really true since most of the numbers we've been discussing are in fact Active Daily logins from Unique users, meaning that if a player bought the game, but didn't log in that day, they aren't counted. It wasn't the 4 million Zev said, but at it's peak, Sept. 16th (unsurprisingly the first Saturday both Leviathan and Trials were available on Consoles) it was at 3.85 million players and two months out would have been last week, so I'm not sure what those numbers were, but either way those numbers would be a bit off due to the new influx of PC players two weeks before who just got the game. What we do know is that 1 week before the PC launch, Console players Active Daily logins were at 1.8 million users, so that is less than the 2 million Zev claimed, but not by much. Now also consider that this is out of the 6.9 million unique accounts that are currently being stat tracked (of which not all existed at that time, specifically somewhere between 1-2 million of those are PC players), which is very likely a pretty reasonable assumption at where sales are roughly at for Destiny 2, since most users that purchase the game would login at least once. One stat I may have misconstrued earlier though is the amount of players who bought The Taken King. I think this shows a better picture of exactly how many unique Users Destiny had between The Taken King and Destiny 2's launch.

This shot was posted by DestinyTracker 6 weeks after the release of Age of Triumph in the 2nd week of May of this year. I was assuming 7 million players bought and played The Taken King. Since we know Destiny brought in 930k new players with Rise of Iron, it's pretty safe to assume The Taken King numbers were actually just shy of 8 million. What is really interesting about this image though, is that 778k players were still playing Destiny Rise of Iron 6 weeks after a free Update, to a DLC that was already 9 months old at the time. We also know that only 3 million players even ever owned Rise of Iron, since only 2.87 million players finished the first RoI story mission based on Trophy data. That means that the player retention of Active Daily users is almost identical for Age of Triumph at 6 weeks when compared to Destiny 2 right now at 2 months and a week after it's launch (that's assuming of those 1.7 million Active Daily users, about 600k of them are PC players, which is probably pretty accurate, and there are only 1.1 million Console players left of that original 3.85 million as of right now).

In short, Destiny is a huge franchise, and while Zev's number's he claimed weren't completely accurate, and didn't account for things like the launch of PC between those time periods which bolstered the userbase with more Active Users, they weren't too far off the mark. Destiny has always had a very avid and active fanbase, honestly probably more so than any other franchise in gaming which is why it has always been previously a top 10 Twitch game, no matter the part of the year (it's at number 10 right now, on a Tuesday when nothing is really going on). But there is no doubt this lull is hurting Destiny 2 on Twitch. Some of the biggest Destiny Streamers have turned into variety streamers, like Gothalion playing more Fortnight lately than Destiny, TrueVanguard playing more Fortnight and PubG than Destiny, and Gernader Jake/Mtashed/Lupo all literally claiming they are now Variety streamers due to their loss of viewership streaming Destiny 2. Outside of Gothalion, most of these guys had never streamed anything but Destiny until after about Age of Triumph this year, and were exclusively Destiny streamers. If I kept on talking about streamers I could talk about their lost income and how many of these smaller guys might stop streaming as a career if Destiny continues down this line, but I digress. Destiny is huge and has one of the most active fanbase in all of gaming, but it seems to be faltering, and that is what we are talking about, is that happening, to what extent, and is it a big deal.

@pyrodactyl: I was comparing Year 3 as a whole, not just the end.

Comparing Destiny 2 to Taken King wouldn't give us any sort of conclusion on whether or not the game is a success. You'd have to compare next year to Taken King for that. You cannot expect every single person at peak of a game to jump over to the sequel immediately. A lot of people just don't do that.

If you're taking a year's worth of sales as a factor for playerbase, then you have to do the same for D2.

Which is also why I thought it was important to mention Year 3. Because even after 3 years, D2 is still more active than D1 was at that time.

You're not wrong though. We both know that is probably at least partly because Bungie practically did not support D1 for a full year after Taken King (Sparrow Racing and Festival of the Lost don't count). So this is an unfair comparison too.

However, it seems we will get two DLC's this year as in Year 1,then a large expansion at Year 2, except this time that same cycle will repeat another year. If this is the case, then I feel like Year 3 Destiny 2 will have a much higher playerbase than Year 3 D1

Personally, I ended up trading in Destiny 2 right away after I beat the campaign and played some of the PvP. If I pick it up again in the future, it will be the complete full game with all the expansions and content included and it would have to be on sale. :)

I definitely fell off quicker than I did with D1, but that's less to do with the fact that I finished everything and more that other games came along. I still play it, but once or twice a week rather than the almost-daily I was doing for about six months of the first game. There's so many more big games out, both in terms of releases for this year and also long-tail multiplayer (stuff like Rocket League or Overwatch), that I'm spending less time on Destiny because I have other games I want to play. I still love it when I'm on it (heck, I bought it on PC and I've just started levelling my sixth character).

I can just give personal anecdote to this question.

From around 10 core players in my clan/friends, 1 is still playing everyday(doing raid almost on a daily basis, she is a bit crazy :p), 1 stopped playing altogether, the rest including me play occasionally (usually finishing up nightfall and flashpoints). I do not raid unless someone needed help to complete the fireteam. I've done Trials maybe 3 times, but that is mainly because my off days are Monday and Tuesday and my decent Crucible friends/clanmates don't play trials except on weekends, which is a bummer. Tried Trials with a less-inclined Crucible fireteam once, got thoroughly destroyed that it tilted me so bad.

The game will be fine, and is doing fine. Its just a little bumpy right now, similar to D1. Even if most people jump ship, the game still has more people playing it than most other games out right now. The problem is, they made the game Darksiders 3: FPS Edition. Once you do the story, collect some weapons and do the end game, its time to look for a new game. So after a few short weeks, closer to a month, you'll likely be done and ready to move on. Which is fine, thats the intentions.