Destiny 2's Final Update Just Out-Peaked a Paid Expansion — and Marathon's All-Time High
Bungie's goodbye patch drew Destiny 2's highest Steam concurrent player count in two years — beating a full 2024 expansion and even Marathon's all-time peak.
Destiny 2 saved its biggest crowd for last.
Bungie’s final update for its decade-old live-service shooter drove the game’s highest Steam concurrent player count in two years, per IGN — the strongest the game has looked since 2023. For a title widely assumed to be winding down into an empty server room, that’s a striking number.
The comparison that makes it land: the surge crushed the concurrent peak set by last year’s Edge of Fate expansion, according to PC Gamer. That was a full paid release. The farewell patch — a free sendoff — outperformed it. Bungie’s goodbye did what a priced 2024 product couldn’t: set a new concurrents benchmark for Destiny 2’s live era.
The second comparison cuts even deeper. The final-update peak also blew past Marathon’s all-time concurrent high on Steam, per IGN. Marathon is Bungie’s next big bet, the game the studio is counting on to carry it into a post-Destiny future. Right now, the outgoing titan’s swan song can draw a bigger simultaneous crowd than its successor’s best day ever.
Off the charts in more ways than one: wrapped around the same launch window was a $180,000 streamer drama involving 4 content creators, an esports org, a boutique PC maker, and an ex-NFL star, per PC Gamer. Destiny 2 going out like that — numbers up, chaos swirling, the community fully unhinged in the best possible way — is almost too on-brand to be accidental.
What the data signals is simple. There’s still a massive, passionate audience attached to this game, and they showed up specifically to mark the ending. For Bungie, that’s both a gift and a challenge: Marathon needs to earn the loyalty Destiny 2 is handing back on the way out the door.
