Destiny 2 finally made the move to Steam, simultaneously breaking Steam’s Top 5 as well as breaking its own game servers.
With the release of the Shadowkeep expansion yesterday, Destiny 2 finally migrated from Blizzard.net, putting the final nail in the coffin of the Bungie-Activision split. Within hours of becoming playable (game servers went live as of 1 PM EST on Tuesday), the game immediately reached Steam’s Top 5 games for concurrent users. Within an hour of going live it nearly doubled Rainbow Six Siege’s average player count for the day as well, topping out (As of 11:30 PM EST on Tuesday) at almost 220,000 peak concurrent players.
Wild success of the re-launch didn’t go off without a hitch unfortunately, since hours later servers for both Destiny 1 and 2 had to go offline due to “emergency maintenance.” The maintenance seemed to have stemmed from issues with people’s logins producing errors. After a short while Bungie did announce the issue had been resolved, but taking a page out of World of Warcraft Classic’s book, Destiny 2 had a login queue in the thousands while players slowly returned to the game.
Destiny 1 and Destiny 2 are being taken offline for emergency maintenance. Please standby for updates.
— Bungie Help (@BungieHelp) October 1, 2019
There also was a seemingly unrelated issue with Steam’s launch specifically related to the purchase of Silver in Destiny 2, which is the premium currency in the game. Prior to the maintenance, the ability to buy Silver was also taken down shortly for a fix, but should be working as of now.
Issues aside, it’s also important to note that Shadowkeep also launched Destiny 2 up to the top of best sellers for the day as well. Granted this is based on migrated/returning players as well as new players, so not that surprising since there wasn’t any other particularly major releases that occurred yesterday.
This metric is a perfect representation of just how big Destiny 2 has become, especially with its transition to free-to-play and full access to all of the season 1 content right out of the box. Second only to Call of Duty, Destiny is the most popular shooter franchise available worldwide, and is now only becoming more accessible to potential players.
For those looking for more info on the free-to-play content available in Destiny 2, you can check here for our breakdown of all the included content in the free release of the game.
