Destiny 2's Final Update Hits a Two-Year Player Peak — and Outpaces Marathon on Steam
Bungie's final Destiny 2 content drop just hit its highest player count in two years — clearing both last year's paid expansion and its own successor's all-time Steam peak.
Destiny 2 saved its biggest crowd for its curtain call. The Monument of Triumph update — the game’s last major content drop — drove Destiny 2 to its highest player count in two years, per IGN. That’s not a soft comeback number. That’s a game going out louder than it’s played in half a decade.
The comparisons are what make it sting and sing at the same time. Monument of Triumph’s Steam concurrent peak surpassed Edge of Fate’s, last year’s paid expansion that Bungie explicitly designed to arrest the game’s decline, per PC Gamer. A free farewell update outperformed a full-price revival attempt. Bungie will not enjoy typing that sentence in a postmortem.
Then there’s the Marathon problem. The same update also cleared Marathon’s all-time Steam peak, per IGN. Bungie’s next big franchise bet — currently in early access and soaking up the studio’s promotional energy — cannot yet match the send-off numbers of the ten-year-old game it’s meant to replace. The math is awkward.
No Destiny 2 sendoff would be complete without chaos riding shotgun, and Monument of Triumph delivered. Per PC Gamer, a $180,000 dispute erupted involving four content creators, an esports org, a boutique PC maker, and an ex-NFL star — the exact kind of lore-dense, inexplicable drama that Destiny’s community has always generated at volume. The game went out, as PC Gamer put it, as god intended.
The signal here is double-edged for Bungie. Monument of Triumph proves the Destiny 2 audience never fully left — it just needed a reason to show up. Whether Marathon can manufacture that same gravitational pull from scratch, without a decade of raids, lore, and streamer theatrics behind it, is the only number that matters next.
