How many people play Destiny 2? — 2023 statistics

Destiny has over 187 million unique players and Destiny 2 has 42.69 million players.

(Sources: VentureBeat, MMO Population, GamesRadar)

• The 30 million player mark was a large milestone and a 5 million increase compared to November of 2015 when it was at 25 million.
• It has an average of 405,000 players each day.
• It is ranked #2 out of 138 tracked MMOs based on server population.
• The game is nearing 10 billion total hours played.

It is no exaggeration that Destiny was one of the biggest releases in 2014 and beyond. That much can be gathered from the initial revenue statistics and alpha achievements, but the biggest point of pride for Bungie is definitely the num

Destiny cost Bungie $500 million to create and promote.

(Source: Polygon)

• This figure included marketing, publication, royalties, and other miscellaneous costs.
• This was the highest budget that Activision had ever invested in a single game.
• Destiny had 500 employees working on it, while Halo: Reach had only 150.
• Based on the company’s earnings, Kotick predicted that Destiny would be its next billion-dollar franchise.

The vast success of the Destiny franchise seems to have been foretold by the massive amount of money that went into establishing the franchise in the first place. Half a billion dollars is no small sum, and Bungie took a massive risk investing all of it into the Destiny franchise, but it definitely paid off.

Destiny used to average 3.2 million players per day.

(Source: IGN)

• The average Destiny player played the game 1.8 times a day with the average session lasting 3 hours.
• On the weekends, the average session would go from 3 to 4 hours.
• The average player had played Destiny 20.9 times.
• In the first month of the game’s release, it had more players than Halo 3 and Halo: Reach combined.
• In the same period, 100 million hours of playtime were logged and 1 billion players died in the Crucible.

The hype surrounding Destiny before it was released in 2014 was massive, which is apparent when you look at the average player count the game had in the first month. Its dungeon-crawling RPG elements really shine through when you realize that the average destiny session lasted 3-4 hours. Other than that, the players managed to accumulate some interesting achievements, as the next line of stats will show.

Destiny players played over 6.4 million games in the game’s alpha stage.

(Source: Geeky Gadgets)

• 149.5 million primary weapon kills were made.
• 21.7 million secondary weapon kills were made.
• 4 million heavy weapon kills were made.
• 21.6 million super ability kills were made.
• 2.8 million orbs of light were gathered.
• 6.8 million control points were captured in the Crucible.
• 1,195 Deathless Medals were awarded in the Crucible.
• 667,966 public events were joined.
• 60.5 million Fallen Dregs were dispatched with extreme prejudice.

In this line of stats, we can see that the small player base of the Destiny alpha phase managed to accumulate some seriously impressive stats, such as 150 million weapon kills and over 1 thousand Deathless Medals. This was the stepping stone for the massive influx of players that would join Destiny when the game was completely finished.

Destiny grossed over $325 million in its first 5 days on the market.

(Source: Activision Blizzard)

• Within its first week, players logged over 100 million hours of playtime.
• In the same time, players participated in over 137 million activities.
• The game has won over 180 million awards to date.
• Destiny was the best-selling video game franchise launch of all time.

Another financial win for Bungie, Destiny achieved profits that other developers could only dream of. Within five days, the company almost made back all of the money that was invested into the franchise, to begin with. Although there is no exact number on the total revenue generated by Destiny and Destiny 2 together, we are sure that the franchise is definitely worth over a billion dollars at this point.

Sony bought Bungie for $3.6 billion in 2022.

(Sources: ShackNews, CNET)

• The acquisition raised some questions about its validity since Bungie is just known for the Destiny series.
• Some speculated that Sony bought Bungie to make sure they would have a shooter to offer players in case Microsoft removed Call of Duty from their platform.
• The acquisition was finalized in July 2022.

This was one of the bigger acquisitions in 2022 as Sony is a massive conglomerate that owns many companies, and it falls among the biggest video game companies around. The acquisition can be considered a safety move just so that Sony could have a reliable FPS game in case some of the bigger franchises were moved from the platform. The video game industry is a turbulent market so anything can happen, and this acquisition was definitely justified.

Destiny 2 players had to complete 20 million Nightmare Containment runs to unlock Solar abilities.

(Source: GameSpot)

• This obligation came with the Season of the Haunted event which emphasized the need for teamwork to get to the established goal.
• Full teams got double points for completing Nightmare Containment runs.
• Upon completing the 20 million runs, the Embers of Empyrean, Char, Ashes, and Wonder were unlocked.
• Some players already had the Embers unlocked as they were present before being locked by the event.

Now it’s time to talk a bit about Destiny 2! The first thing we’d like to mention is the inclusion of the community in Destiny 2’s events as they wanted to make unlocking special abilities a whole experience that was fueled by teamwork and a sense of dependence. This has become a frequent thing in the gaming world as global community events are a great way of tracking how players perform and how much they enjoy the games they play.

Destiny 2 had 93 million hours watched on Twitch in 2022.

(Source: Sullygnome)

• The game had 7 million broadcasting hours in the same time frame.
• There were, on average, 10,623 viewers were watching the game.
• It had a viewer ratio of 13.2.
• The max number of viewers the game had was 451,907.
• There were 353,223 broadcasters streaming the game.
• In comparison, Destiny had 262,000 hours watched in 2022.

The difference between viewer engagement on Twitch between Destiny and Destiny 2 is staggering, but that is to be expected since Destiny 2 is the better game, with more content to enjoy, and more reasons to watch as a result. 93 million hours watched for a single year is excellent as many franchises cannot even fathom those types of figures across multiple years.

Destiny 2’s Season of the Seraph has brought extreme issues to the game.

(Source: CBR)

• The issues were mostly expressed as problems with the game’s PC performance.
• Fans have complained about the issues and have stated that each Destiny 2 update kicked down the performance of the game by a few degrees.
• many players have left the game due to these issues.
• Destiny 2’s API was disabled for the second time in the game’s history, pinning the in-game problems to the Revision Zero weapon.
• Overall, all issues seem to be related to Bungie’s excessive reliance on Destiny 2’s API.

Destiny 2 has had issues in the past, and all of those issues have just been building up with each new update and expansion in the game, which has been attributed to Destiny 2’s unstable and unreliable API. With each passing update, fans have complained that the game had dropped in quality, causing stuttering issues and a variety of other problems. There isn’t an immediate fix for the issues and Bungie has stated that they are working on it.

Destiny 2: The Witch Queen had over 1 million preorders.

(Source: GameRant)

• The milestone was reached on February 1st, 2022.
• The Witch Queen brought a tremendous amount of content into the game, which is why it was so hyped and preordered so many times.
• The Deluxe Edition of the expansion gave players a year’s worth of content at a great price.

The Witch Queen is one of the biggest Destiny 2 expansions to come out and it came with a wide variety of additional content to keep players happy for months. The hype for the expansion is apparent when you take a look at the expansion’s pre-orders, which are quite impressive when you think about the number of sales the game has in general and how many sales it managed to acquire to date.

Destiny 2’s player count reached an all-time high after the release of the Lightfall expansion.

(Source: PCGamesN)

• The game had 316,000 concurrent players on Steam.
• The release of Lightfall also marks the start of Destiny 2’s 20th season.
• The players anticipating the release of the DLC most likely hopped on the game to get some practice in before it comes out.
• The player count rose by about 230,000 over the 8 days leading up to the release of Lightfall.

This is another aspect of MMORPG games where players will enjoy the game adamantly and get a considerable number of achievements, only to put it down for a while until new content is added. When the Lightfall expansion was announced, players got excited and got back into the game, pushing the total player count to over 300,000, which is massive considering that the count usually hovered around 80,000.

A Destiny 2 cheat distributor agreed to pay Bungie $13.5 million in damages.

(Source: IGN)

• Bungie accused Elite Boss Tech, a Canadian cheat company of violating Destiny 2’s user agreement.
• The company’s software cost Bungie a lot of money to develop anti-cheat software.
• Bungie also stated that the software damaged Destiny 2’s reputation and commercial viability by altering players’ experiences.
• The $13.5 million was calculated based on the total number of times the software was downloaded times $2,000 each.

Lawsuits happen, but they are usually for smaller offenses and lower in monetary value, but this lawsuit was a big hit in the Destiny community as no one likes seeing cheaters in their games, and that goes for both the developer and the players. Luckily for Bungie, everything turned out okay and the matter was resolved.

Bungie sued a Youtuber for $7.6 million for fake DMCA claims.

(Source: Polygon)

• Nicholas Minor’s channel was struck with DMCA takedowns, so he decided to retaliate by making his own claims.
• He created two fake Gmail addresses and posed as CSG Global, a copyright management firm.
• Those addresses were used to send 96 takedown emails to Youtube, mostly in regard to three channels, one of which was the official Bungie account.
• This had a large impact on the Destiny community, so Bungie asked for $7.6 million in damages.

This is another escapade that Bungie had in the legal world, where a Youtuber tried to find loopholes in the system to strike down multiple channels, including Bungie’s main Youtube channel. Bungie immediately took action and the lawsuit could easily be described as a joke, largely due to the actions and statements of the defendant, Nicholas Minor. Bungie won by a landslide.

To sum up

And that would be all we have to say about one of the best-selling video game franchises in history! As you can see, the series has had a rollercoaster of a time getting to where it is today and has had its fair share of turbulence in the form of lawsuits and issues with the game. Nevertheless, Destiny always rises up and comes back better despite the issues it faces. The Destiny series is a massive success for Bungie and we are happy to be able to present you this information so you can truly understand what a titan this series is in the gaming industry. We sincerely hope that you have enjoyed the content presented here and that you have learned something new!