Reacting to the news that Destiny 2 will be delivering it’s final live service update on June 9th, the community have started a Change.org petition to try and convince Sony to start development on a Destiny 3.
At the time of writing, the petition has just passed 200,000 signatures. My bet is that it will continue to gain traction as we approach the June 9th update and news spreads of the petition.
On that note, there is also a plan among the Destiny community to all log in on the 9th of June in solidarity to show Bungie and Sony that we all still care about this game and that we all want content to continue or for a Destiny 3 to begin development.
Will it work?
No. Sorry to be blunt but chances are a petition on Change.org is not going to change Sony’s mind. They care about money, not signatures. They have already made the decision and layoffs are already probably signed off.
The log in has a slightly better chance of making an impact – albeit a super slim chance. Seeing massive player counts for a final update is probably expected by Sony and Bungie – they know players who haven’t played in years will probably pop in and check out the last update. Unfortunately, it won’t mean much.
What it will do though is show that there is an appetite for Destiny content. It’ll also likely show Sony up a bit – chances are if the player counts reach excessive highs – the kind of highs they only got during paid expansions – for a free quality of life update then it will at least show Sony that the interest is there and that the players were there. Perhaps if Sony had let Bungie release updates like this when the game was live, they wouldn’t be in this position (more on that in a future article).
Dwarfing Marathon Numbers
One of the best things that could come from this (at least from my perspective) is that the Destiny player count is likely to absolutely dwarf that of the Marathon player count – on steam at least. Showing Sony they have made the wrong decision – although I have to believe they already know this based on the backlash online.
We know that Marathon’s player base is small compared to Destiny’s. However, most comparisons in the outer sphere of the gaming community have been based on Steam player counts over the last few months. Destiny has been in the worst state it’s ever been over the last few months. The last content update we got was December. That’s over 6 months with no new content – the longest content drought we’ve ever had… and on some days our numbers on Steam alone were higher than that of Marathon – a game only 2 months old.
Destiny’s primary player base is on consoles, Steam making up a smaller percentage of the player base. According to Popularity Report, Destiny was still getting around 180-200k active players per day when the news broke about ending service.
Marathon’s player base is primarily on Steam. According to reports from Paul Tassi who has confirmed this with his sources at Bungie, around 75% of Marathon’s player base is on Steam.
Now you could argue that Marathon is coming to the end of it’s first season and naturally games in this genre see a drop off at this time (let’s ignore Arc Raiders for now). However, Marathon is about to launch into Season 2 – with a week of free access. I am expecting a pretty sizeable bump in Marathon’s player count on Steam during this time – but I would bet my house that it will not be anywhere close to Destiny’s peaks. I’d be surprised if it passes 40k to be honest.
Destiny 2’s free update on June 9th on the other hand… I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit numbers in excess of the last two paid expansions – maybe even nearing that of the Final Shape if the update is received well and based on what I’ve been reading, it’s looking pretty spicy.