In the latest chapter of Bungie’s ongoing performance art piece entitled “How Fast Can We Burn Down the Legacy of One of the Most Beloved FPS Franchises of All Time?”, we bring you Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate—a title that might as well refer to Bungie’s current relationship with its own playerbase.
The expansion launched earlier this week to a lukewarm reception and a quiet thud rather than a triumphant bang. On Steam, which is the only platform where player counts are publicly visible, the expansion didn’t even crack 100,000 concurrent players on launch day. That’s right—The Edge of Fate capped at 99,131 on Tuesday and dropped to 89,838 in the last 24 hours. At the time of this writing, the number is hovering around 74,469.
For context, this is a franchise that used to pull in 200K to 300K concurrent players at expansion launches. Bungie managed to not just fumble the ball this time but punt it into an active volcano and then blame the fans for standing too close to the fire. Even if console numbers were somehow triple that of Steam (which they almost certainly aren’t), these numbers would still make any studio exec start Googling “how to quietly lay off a live-service team.”
And you can bet that is exactly what Bungie leadership is doing right now.
Let’s start with the one thing Edge of Fate actually did right: the campaign. No sarcasm—this is the one shining star. The narrative team managed to pull off a story that players have praised for its emotional resonance and storytelling chops. But everything around it? Picture a diamond buried in a landfill. Sure, it’s shiny. But it smells like rot and corporate apathy.
Let’s talk content—or lack thereof. No new strikes. No new Crucible maps. The Kepler Zone, which was teased like the second coming of the Dreaming City, ended up being a limp, barren wasteland of nothingness. And then there’s Matterspark, the new gameplay mechanic that Bungie apparently thought would be fun, engaging, and exciting. Instead, it landed somewhere between “wet tissue paper” and “why does this exist?” as far as community sentiment goes.
Bungie’s idea of innovation these days is rolling out a feature that feels like it was copy-pasted from a discarded Destiny 1 design doc and smothered with monetization glue. Which brings us to the real villain here: Bungie’s leadership, a group of corporate necromancers so determined to wring money from this game that they seem to have accidentally strangled it to death.
Let’s be clear—this is not new behavior. Bungie has a long and storied history of being aggressively anti-consumer. From copy-pasting Eververse shaders into multiple bundles, to plagiarizing fan concepts, to stripping out content players paid for and reselling it under new names (or just stripping it out all together, i.e. Red War, Forsaken, etc.), the studio has redefined what it means to treat your fanbase like an easily-exploited ATM. And the people steering this ship? They’ve proven time and again that they either don’t understand what players want or simply don’t care—as long as the seasonal pass gets another coat of silver paint.
The irony is that Destiny 2 still has some of the best gunplay and combat feel in any first-person shooter on the market. The bones are so good. Which is why it’s especially tragic to watch those bones be picked clean by a leadership team of greedy vultures more interested in short-term metrics than long-term success.
Maybe, maybe, Sony will eventually get tired of Bungie’s C-Suite bullshit and dishonesty and pull the plug on what remains of their independence. Because at this point, it seems abundantly clear that “independence” is just an excuse to be incredibly shitty at the expense of anyone and everyone not on the board or with “Chief” in their title.
Fire the execs, bring in actual creatives, and rebuild Destiny from the ashes. Because the foundation is too good to waste. The game deserves better. The players deserve better.
