Have you also felt recently that more Guardians are hanging around in Destiny 2? You could be right, as player numbers are said to have risen to over a million Guardians in the past week. This information comes from a Discord bot that reads the statistics of active players.
What about the player numbers? Destiny 2 seems to be thriving right now: Bungie’s shooter reportedly surpassed the one million player mark last week. 1.01 million Guardians were said to have been roaming around in Destiny 2 on June 15 alone. Naturally, servers are fuller on weekends than on weekdays.
The players are distributed among the activities as follows, with some Guardians playing multiple modes:
- PvE: 960,000 players
- Crucible: 482,000 players
- Gambit: 272,000 players
- Raids: 141,000 players
The numbers refer to Guardians across all platforms combined and are sourced from the Discord bot Charlemagne. This bot extracts Guardian data from Bungie’s API.
Already last May, statements from Activision indicated that Destiny and Destiny 2 together had about 6 million active users per month in the fourth quarter of 2018.
COO Collister Johnson stated that the publisher lost about 12 million active users in the last quarter. Half of that was attributed to the Destiny franchise. Bungie and Activision have been parting ways since early 2019.
Why are there more players now? It is currently a really exciting time for Destiny players:
- Just recently, Season 7 and the Season of Opulence have begun in Destiny 2.
- Additionally, the new expansion Shadowkeep, translated as Fortress of Shadows, has been announced. It will be released on October 1, 2019.
- With the upcoming expansion, Year 1 of Destiny will also become Free-to-Play. With “New Light,” new players can dive into the Destiny universe. If they want to experience more of the game, they can purchase the expansions and seasons they are currently interested in.
What do the players say? Players express their excitement on Twitter about Destiny being on the rise right now. For instance, Pyro Gaming states that many games have been called Destiny killers. Yet Destiny 2 still lives on despite Anthem, Division 2, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Fortnite.
NerfThatNerd further mentions that with the upcoming expansion, there might be 5 million Guardians.
There is speculation on Reddit about why the player numbers have surged. Guardians suspect that it is due to the positive feedback regarding the Season of Opulence and the Menagerie, as well as the news about the upcoming changes in October.


