Bungie laid off eight percent of its staff in October, and the blame was laid squarely at the feet of weak player retention and yearly revenue that missed projections by 45 percent. Yet as Steam’s top sellers of 2023 surprisingly reveal, Destiny 2 is still making a lot of money.
In Steam’s best of 2023 rankings, Destiny 2 was listed as one of the platform’s platinum sellers, putting it in the top 12 of games overall when it comes to gross revenue. It’s a spot Destiny 2 has now held for three years running. While Steam lists the 12 games in a random order, making it hard to gauge the intricacies between Destiny 2’s performance year-on-year, it makes the statistics around its missed revenue projections all the more baffling.
It isn’t all that surprising to see Destiny 2 gracing the top of the charts each year. Despite technically being free to play, the majority of content is locked behind expansions, seasons, and dungeon keys. On top of that, every season adds new premium cosmetics to the Eververse store, and over the past year, seasonal events such as The Dawning have become more heavily monetized as well. Destiny 2 has a lot of ways of making money, but Bungie appears to have high expectations for how effective these revenue streams should be.
To some degree, it makes sense. Destiny 2 is more than likely an incredibly expensive game to upkeep, especially in comparison to other live-service titles it’s competing with, which means it has to make more money than them to turn a profit as well. The cost of game development has ballooned in recent years and Destiny 2 produces a lot of content for its hefty annual model, which includes a full expansion followed up by four seasons and two dungeons. To miss projections by 45 percent is a significant blow, but as content creator Aztecross asked, what exactly were those projections considering Destiny 2 remained a platinum seller despite 2023’s hurdles?
There’s a good chance those projections were put in place after February’s Lightfall expansion broke Destiny 2’s all-time peak concurrent player count upon release. That suggested it was about to be a strong year for Destiny 2 as it began to wrap up the Light and Darkness saga, but it took less than a week for Lightfall’s reviews to sink to “mostly negative” on Steam as player sentiment quickly soured on the quality of the campaign. That negativity carried through the rest of the year too, resulting in Season of the Wish launching with the lowest player count peak on Steam of any season launch to date.
Destiny 2 may not have had a year much worse than its previous ones, but if Bungie had been expecting 2023 to be a year of growth for the title, those hopes—and the projection they created—quickly fell flat.
