Many people are wondering how many players the MMO shooter Destiny 2 actually has. Now there is a hint in the quarterly report from Activision for Q1 2019 regarding the player numbers of Destiny and Destiny 2 at the end of 2018. So before Activision parted ways with Bungie. Therefore, about 6 million people played the Destiny games.
How many players does Destiny have roughly? According to the latest statements from Activision, Destiny and Destiny 2 together had approximately 6 million active users per month in Q4 2018.
This is the metric of “monthly active users” (MAU) that companies like to report.
To qualify as a “monthly active user”, one must have logged in at least once in a month; then they count as an MAU for that particular month.
Activision Blizzard takes the MAU of all three months in a quarter and divides that by 3 to get the figure that is then presented to the investors and displayed in fancy graphs.
How do they arrive at this number? Activision explained in the financial report for Q1 2019 (January to March) that they had 41 million active users at Activision itself.
In Q4 2018 (October-December), they still had 53 million – so 12 million more users.
The COO of Activision, Coddy Johnson, says that this loss of 12 million users comes about half from the fact that the Destiny players are now missing.
Because Activision has famously parted ways with Bungie and therefore the Destiny users no longer count in Activision’s numbers.
How accurate are the numbers? Activision at least gives us a rough direction of how many players Destiny had per month. However, there are three problems:
- For one, the number of 6 million active players includes not only Destiny 2, but Activision also counts Destiny 1, which is still being played – but we don’t know how many of those still count.
- Furthermore, Activision is merely rounding here. It states that it is “approximately half.”
- And the numbers are not current, but are about six months old when they were announced. At that time, Forsaken, the major Destiny 2 expansion, was still relatively fresh, although Activision was already dissatisfied with the sales figures then.
But with 6 million active players at the end of 2018 after Forsaken, who are actively playing each month, we now have a benchmark. It’s not as low as some figures, that have been spread by daily trackers.
The last time we looked at the player numbers of Destiny 2 was after the release of Forsaken – but at that time with daily figures.
