Destiny 2’s Lightfall expansion shatters its own concurrent player record on Steam

destructoid.com:

It’s been a huge week for the Destiny 2 team at Bungie. On February 28 the latest expansion, Lightfall, was released and the player base came out to support in its masses. Not only did Destiny 2: Lightfall see massive numbers and a surge in concurrent players, but it broke its own previous Steam record.

As shown on SteamDB, the record for the number of concurrent players on Steam prior to February 28’s release of Lightfall was around 292,000. This happened with 2019’s release of the Shadowkeep expansion, which was the first major DLC to be released independently by Bungie after acquiring publishing rights for the series from Activision earlier that year. 2022’s The Witch Queen came in close, but Lightfall saw a record-breaking 316,750 concurrent Steam players logging in to discover the secrets of the newly discovered city of Neomuna.

It’s unclear what precisely drew so many Guardians into the game at once with the launch of Lightfall. Is it the new Strand subclass? Perhaps it’s the new storyline detailing Calus and his Shadow Legion’s invasion of Neomuna in search of the Veil? Maybe it’s just hundreds of thousands of people excited to continue with the seasonal storyline, which sees Mara Sov team up with Guardians to face Xivu Arath’s impending war. Whatever the reason, the record has been smashed for Destiny 2 by over 10,000 players.

Destiny 2: Lightfall is the penultimate installment in the Light and Dark saga of the game, which will be concluded with 2024’s The Final Shape. Bungie recently released a mammoth blog post detailing the year ahead, and it is expected that players will hear more about the future of Destiny within the next 12 months as we draw closer to the next expansion’s release.