In the latest This Week at Bungie blog post, the aforementioned Bungie revealed some juicy statistics about the state of the Destiny franchise. In Destiny’s lifetime, since the first game launched seven years ago, the two games in the series have had over 187 million unique players who have collectively played 9.8 billion hours of the game. For reference, 10 billion hours equates to “about 1,100,000 years,” which is a pretty staggeringly high number.
187 million players is an extraordinarily high number for any game or series to boast. For comparison, the free-to-play Call of Duty Warzone—arguably one of the most popular franchises in the world—reached 100 million players just shy of a year from its initial launch.
Those two numbers together reveal an average playtime for any player of about 53 hours. Many longtime Destiny players have stats far exceeding that, however. For example, my own Destiny 2 stats show me with a playtime of 3158 hours (which I’ll be adding to later tonight), with an additional 1259 hours logged in Destiny 1, for a total of 4417 hours in the series. That’s more than 83 times the average.
Given the averages, Bungie should be able to proudly boast 10 billion hours played sometime within the next two months at the most, and likely in much less time given the recent popularity surge that Destiny 2 has enjoyed. Recent statistics show concurrent player counts only increasing with each new season over the last year.
These stats come alongside some celebration at enormous numbers for the Trials of Osiris rework that took place last weekend. Destiny 2’s top-tier competitive PvP mode, Trials had suffered in the past, but recent changes and a renewed focus on the PvP experience made this past weekend one of the most populated Trials weekends ever.
Per Bungie:
- 750k players played Trials – more than we have seen since the early days of Destiny 2. Not only that, 120k of those were first-time-ever players, and another 470k hadn’t played recently.
- 237k players went flawless, with 105K players going flawless for the first time ever!
- An average of 30% of active players played Trials each day this weekend, topping out at over 32% on Saturday. No day prior had ever gone above 21%.
- Over 2.8M hours of Trials were played this weekend, eclipsing the highest prior single week total by a whopping 600K hours!
They also included a graph of the last year and a half of Trials (since the mode was reintroduced in March 2020), to show just what a big leap this weekend was.
The big numbers here are the new and lapsed players that Trials brought in this last weekend. Still, Bungie is making additional tweaks to the mode to ensure that everyone’s experience is fun and rewarding. Notably, some specialized skill-based matchmaking will kick in and aid players who are going on losing streaks where their matches are blowouts and they aren’t winning a single round. Bungie promises you can’t just tank your rank to guarantee easy matches though. Start winning matches, and you’ll be kicked right back into the standard matchmaking pool.
There will also be changes to try to match Flawless players together more often, and a change to the matchmaking screen so that players can’t see if they’ve matched with solo players or teams.
Bungie is preparing to launch the next major Destiny 2 expansion, The Witch Queen, early next year, using the next sixth months to build a solid foundation for the changes that are incoming. The Witch Queen should have a renewed focus on PvP in general, with new maps and modes incoming, and this Trials revamp to get more players playing has been a major piece of that puzzle.
With impressive numbers all around, Bungie has definitively shown that Destiny 2 isn’t going anywhere as it continues to grow, boasting numbers that any independent developer should be proud of, particularly after breaking away from one of the video game industry’s biggest publishers. In fact, we know that Bungie has plans to continue Destiny 2 at least through The Final Shape expansion, expected to launch in early 2024, likely with a full year of content beyond that. Bungie even teases more to come after that conclusion of the Light and Darkness Saga.
How many hours have you contributed towards the total lifetime hours in Destiny? Are you one of 187 million Guardians?
[Source: TWAB]
