Bungie confirmed that, after its next update, the studio will be leaving Destiny 2 behind to focus on Marathon. That has resulted in the sequel's player count spiking, either as people return to say goodbye or perhaps as a message to Bungie that there's still life in Destiny 2 yet.
While it's difficult to determine how many people played Destiny 2 on PS5 and Xbox Series X over the weekend, the Bungie game was fewer than ten players shy of hitting a concurrent player count of 19,000 on Steam, according to SteamDB. That's the highest player count Destiny 2 has reached on the platform since it dropped below 20,000 on February 2 and stayed there.
It was the first weekend since the announcement that Destiny 2 updates are coming to an end, so a player count spike was expected. What will be interesting now is not just if that slightly elevated player count can be sustained - hovering around 20k won't be enough to coinvince Bungie to change its mind - but whether it continues to rise between now and the game's final update.
The days of attracting more than 300,000 players in one go are long gone....
