Destiny 2’s Final Update Pulls Its Biggest Crowd in Two Years

Destiny 2’s final update went live on June 9, 2026, and the player surge that followed pushed the game’s 24-hour Steam concurrent peak to 167,000, the highest Destiny 2 has touched since 2024’s The Final Shape expansion.

The spike didn’t just break the game’s own two-year drought. It blew past Marathon’s all-time peak of 77,000, the Bungie extraction shooter Sony positioned as the studio’s next bet, and it did so on a workday afternoon in the United States. Some players started reporting login trouble as the crowd piled in.

A Last Hurrah, Measured in Players

SteamCharts, the third-party tracker that pulls directly from Valve’s data, listed Destiny 2’s 24-hour peak at 167,867 concurrent players on the update’s first day, with 316,651 standing as the game’s all-time record. The 167,000 figure is the highest the game has seen since The Final Shape expansion in June 2024, which peaked at 314,000 on Steam. Cade Onder’s report on the 167,000-player surge framed the moment as the biggest Destiny 2 crowd in two years. That previous high came on the back of a paid expansion. This one came on the back of a sendoff.

Bungie announced last month that the June 9 patch would be Destiny 2’s last content update. The studio’s servers will keep running, but no new seasons, expansions, or story beats are on the calendar. Destiny 2’s live Steam Charts data shows the 30-day average climbed to 16,830 with the June 9 surge, up from a baseline near 10,000.

The June 9 build added new rewards, raid and dungeon updates, Pantheon 2.0, sandbox changes, and brought Sparrow Racing League back as a permanent mode. None of it is built to last. Players are logging in to use it anyway. The studio’s own server status page has acknowledged background maintenance and queue placement for users trying to get in.

• Destiny 2 24-hour Steam peak on June 9, 2026: 167,000 (167,867 per SteamCharts)
• Destiny 2 all-time Steam peak: 316,651
• The Final Shape 2024 Steam peak: 314,000
• Marathon all-time peak per IGN’s June 9 framing: 77,000

The Player Campaign to Crash the Servers

The surge wasn’t organic. Forbes contributor Paul Tassi reported on June 2 that a community campaign was organizing to pile current and lapsed Destiny 2 players into the game on June 9, with the explicit goal of hitting high player-count watermarks and forcing Bungie and Sony to feel the weight of the community. The symbolic target was the all-time record of 316,000 set during Lightfall, with a more achievable benchmark of surpassing Marathon’s 77,000 all-time peak. The community’s June 9 record push had also surfaced plans to spam the chat of that week’s Sony State of Play with “We want Destiny 3” messaging. The campaign worked faster than anyone expected.

Within hours of the update, SteamCharts showed the 24-hour peak climbing through 167,000, more than double the 10,000-concurrent baseline Destiny 2 had been averaging before the announcement. Players took to social media to report login queues and matchmaking failures consistent with server strain. Bungie’s own server status page acknowledged background maintenance and queue placement for some users. The community’s stated aim was to crash the servers, and the login queues that followed suggest they got close.

There’s a larger movement to get as many current and lapsed Destiny 2 players into the game on June 9 with the goal of hitting high playercount watermarks.

Why Bungie Is Walking Away

Bungie told its community in May that the studio was ending active development on Destiny 2 to redirect resources. The official reason, repeated in studio communications and picked up by outlets including IGN, is that the team needs to support Marathon and the studio’s other live-service work. The decision landed in a fan base that had been expecting more expansions.

Players made their displeasure visible during Summer Game Fest with calls for a third game. A Change.org petition to develop Destiny 3 had passed 122,000 signatures by late May, per TweakTown. The community campaign on June 9 was, in effect, a second front of the same protest. Bungie’s planned layoffs after D2 ends reported via Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier that Destiny 3 is not in active development at the studio.

Bungie’s staff are pitching and prototyping new projects, including games set in the Destiny universe, but none have been greenlit. There is no guarantee any will move forward in a market where Sony has raised console prices and PlayStation Plus subscription prices to cover cost pressure. The studio is also preparing a significant round of layoffs after the wind-down, per Bloomberg; the size of the cut had not been disclosed at the time of reporting.

The Replacement That Hasn’t Landed

Marathon is the game Bungie was supposed to be pivoting toward. The $40 extraction shooter launched on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Steam on March 5, 2026, and it was meant to be the studio’s first new franchise in over a decade. Three months later, the Marathon Season 2 free week test is running the same week as Destiny 2’s sendoff, with the new franchise leaning on a free trial to bring lapsed players back in. The two titles are now sharing a release-week stage that was not on the original calendar.

A pre-launch Server Slam event pulled a 143,621 concurrent peak on Steam, per Kotaku. The full release, as of late May, was reportedly hovering between 10,000 and 15,000 concurrent players on Steam, the platform where Marathon has reportedly sold the majority of its copies. The game has not consistently held a top-10 weekly position on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, or PC since launch, and Sony has yet to confirm a sales figure.

That replacement story has been expensive for Sony. Sony’s $765M Bungie impairment losses recorded nearly $765 million in impairment losses tied to Bungie in FY25, including a $560 million hit in the fourth quarter alone, which closed roughly four weeks after Marathon’s launch.

Bungie has already gone through multiple rounds of mass layoffs since its 2022 acquisition, and the studio’s previous CEO, Pete Parsons, was replaced. The fiscal year ahead, FY26, may add to the write-down, per Kotaku. Marathon’s launch is the one Bungie is being measured against, and the 77,000 peak the new franchise managed to clear is what the studio’s oldest live game just doubled on its way out.

What Players Have to Work With

The June 9 update is what fans have. Permanent Sparrow Racing League, Pantheon 2.0, the new rewards track, and the chance to log in with the rest of the community one more time. Servers stay live. As Forbes’ Paul Tassi wrote before the update, high numbers are “unlikely to be sustainable beyond a few weeks, or at best months,” given that there are zero updates to come.

It was a public statement that the audience Bungie is sunsetting is still here, still active, and still showing up the same week the studio is asking them to move on. Cade Onder’s IGN report framed the moment plainly: 167,000 on Steam, the highest in two years, on the day the game stops growing. Marathon, the $40 extraction shooter Sony positioned as Bungie’s next bet, is still working to keep its player base from sliding back toward launch-day lows.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was Destiny 2’s final update released?

Bungie released Destiny 2’s final content update on June 9, 2026. The patch added new rewards, raid and dungeon updates, Pantheon 2.0, sandbox changes, and brought Sparrow Racing League back as a permanent mode. Servers will remain online for the foreseeable future, but no new content is in development.

How many players did Destiny 2 hit on its final update?

Destiny 2’s 24-hour concurrent peak on Steam reached 167,000 on June 9, 2026, with SteamCharts showing a more precise figure of 167,867. It is the game’s highest concurrent count since 2024’s The Final Shape expansion, which peaked at 314,000.

Is Destiny 3 in development?

Not in active development, according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. Bungie staff are pitching and prototyping new projects, including games set in the Destiny universe, but none have been greenlit.

What was Marathon’s all-time peak player count?

Marathon, Bungie’s $40 extraction shooter that launched on March 5, 2026, peaked at 77,000 concurrent players on Steam, per the IGN report that framed the June 9 campaign. A pre-launch Server Slam event had reached 143,621, per Kotaku. The Destiny 2 player surge on June 9 doubled Marathon’s 77,000 peak within hours.

Is Bungie planning more layoffs?

Yes, according to Bloomberg. Bungie is preparing a significant round of layoffs after the end of Destiny 2’s development, with the size of the cut not disclosed at the time of reporting.