After the high Destiny 2 player numbers of the recently much-praised DLC “The Witch Queen”, the keepers asked themselves: “How well did it go in 2023 at the start of the Lightfall DLC?“ MeinMMO has therefore tracked the number of players during the release and shows it to you.
Towards the end of Year 5, sentiment in the Destiny 2 community was moderately good. After weak seasons, above all the “season of the looters”, and problems in the game, the regular players of the loot shooter in particular found it difficult to get in the DLC mood for Lightfall.
And that, although Bungie stirred the advertising drum with a fresh start, a brand new location and the new, powerful subclass “Strang”. Some even announced that they would be canceling their Lightfall pre-order again because they had run over the mill wheel of Destiny 2’s gameplay rut.
But when the witness arrived live in the solar system at 6:00 p.m. on February 28, 2023, the Guardians apparently stood by their Light-giver, the Traveler, again. MeinMMO shows you the Steam numbers for the Lightfall launch.
Destiny 2: Lightfall – Collect all Guardian trailers
More videos
DLC launch brings Destiny 2 new Steam record
Hardly anyone expected this: After all these omens and reviews from the community, the start of Destiny 2: Lightfall was not under a good star. Players expected Lightfall to be a flop in the pre-sale. Also because Bungie did not announce a million limit for pre-sales this year, as with Witch Queen.
It was all the more surprising that developer Bungie had never had such an influx of players with the Lightfall DLC on Steam as yesterday on the opening night.
In 2023, so many concurrent Guardians on Steam dived into the expansion that Bungie even broke its own player record with it.
However, these numbers only apply to players from Steam and also include the curious NewLight players who were Free2Play and thus free in Destiny 2 last night, so probably did not buy Lightfall but only examined it. But one can assume that the rush and the number of players on PS4, PS5 and Xbox was similarly high last night.
Another piece of information is that while player counts on Steam fluctuate depending on the quality of the current content offering, they’ve been fairly stable over the years. This has resulted in Destiny 2 barely leaving the top games rankings on the Steam charts.
Last night, the loot shooter ranked sixth in the top games in the middle of the field – so it’s considered a long-running hit. Destiny 2 is almost on par with the current survival hit Sons of the Forest
Can Destiny 2 maintain this level? The numbers have now been put into perspective again. At the time of this MeinMMO article, 186,346 simultaneous players were playing the new Lightfall content.
However, these numbers should continue to decrease over the coming weeks and then settle back down to the Destiny all-time standard of between 90,000 and 60,000 players at the peak.
Without the statistics for the other platforms, you can’t evaluate the relative popularity of the Destiny 2 expansions. But the statistics show that the Lightfall hype was not expected but big.
It remains to be seen whether Bungie not only manages to lure its players into the game, but also to convince them of the long-term offer of its loot shooter.
Are you happy about this unexpected success of Destiny 2 and now you have the right answer to questions like “Does anyone still play it”? Or do you say that Lightfall will not be able to maintain this level in the long term? Please write us your answer in the comments.
In Destiny 2: Lightfall, players are also currently being killed by all new enemies:
In Destiny 2: Lightfall there are new enemies that keep you on your toes – this is how you kill them most effectively