Destiny 2 Is In Dire Straits, Is This The End Of Bungie's Hit Game?

It has been a tumultuous time for Destiny 2—and even as we were writing this with the game showing its lowest player count ever, Bungie dropped a new update hoping to fix some player progression complaints and keep people invested. The writing might just be on the wall, though. Despite a major leak for Year of the Prophecy, the upcoming Renegades expansion and the successful expulsion of AimJunkies cheating, interest in Destiny 2 is at an all-time low. It's a rather ominous outlook for fans of the game, especially since the studio already lost about 29% of its staff last year, after 220 employees were laid off and 155 were shipped off to Sony Interactive Entertainment. The game is down to just 22K players at time of this writing and the usual mid-year spike in Destiny 2 players did not materialize in 2025, leaving the fate of the game in an uncertain state.


Bungie's 9.1.5.1 update, released hours ago for Destiny 2, may help steady the tide. Bungie has announced a plan to deprecate Unstable Cores with the release of Renegades on December 2nd, but in the interim will be dropping 777,777 Unstable Cores in a catch-up chest so players can infuse gear before doing so requires Enhancement Cores and Glimmer. Reward Power has also been improved across both PvE and PvP Portal Content, which should help speed up the grind across the entire playerbase. While this will certainly help improve the experience for players still onboard, we aren't sure if it will boost activity. The impact of Renegades will likely determine whether or not Destiny 2 continues to receive support at all, but since the only other Bungie project at time of writing is the delayed Marathon, which missed its September release date, Bungie may be running out of options with or without Destiny.

Hopefully, such an esteemed developer manages to turn the tides and these numbers aren't as doom and gloom as people are claiming. For most games, 20K really isn't that bad. It's a far cry from the peak days of Bungie's ownership of Halo, though, and does seem to mark a definitive end to Destiny's golden era, even if they do manage to come back from this.