Destiny 2 players are becoming rarer and rarer by the minute, with player counts plummeting post-The Edge of Fate. There might be some hope on the horizon, but the number of players actively logging in is quite concerning.
Though there’s no easy, official way to see Destiny 2‘s player count, third-party applications can draw from API data to provide an estimate of how many guardians were in the game at a given point. One of them takes data from the Bungie API itself, while another draws from Steam. Here are the methods we use to check Destiny 2‘s player count, whether you’re looking to watch the decline or have a little hope for the future.
How to see Destiny 2’s player count
There are a couple of different ways to check Destiny 2‘s player count, and they depend on what information you’d like to discover. Fan-made website popularity.report gathers all sorts of historical data on the total playerbase since 2017, so it’s a good source if you’re looking for a holistic approach.
This handy website also lets you see the player count for multiple activities, which is perfect for figuring out what the most popular spots are—in other words, what’s keeping Destiny 2 players still engaged and what’s probably not worth matchmaking into.
If you’re looking to compare the current playerbase against specific moments in Destiny 2, here’s a list of the major expansions and updates released since 2019. Due to the number of seasons, we’re excluding them from the list, but these periodic releases used to dictate the ebb and flow of guardians in-game.
| Expansion | Release Date |
|---|---|
| Shadowkeep | Oct. 1, 2019 |
| Beyond Light | Nov. 10, 2020 |
| The Witch Queen | Feb. 22, 2022 |
| Lightfall | Feb. 28, 2023 |
| Into the Light* | April 9, 2024 |
| The Final Shape | June 4, 2024 |
| The Edge of Fate | July 15, 2025 |
| Renegades | Dec. 2, 2025 |
*Into the Light was not an expansion, but it was a huge update, and it’s widely considered one of Destiny 2‘s finest moments.
These dates provide an easy baseline for your calculations, for instance, when comparing the decline after Lightfall or putting expansion launches against each other.
How to check Destiny 2’s concurrent players
Though popularity.report shows daily data, you can get some partial, to-the-hour numbers from SteamCharts and Steamdb.info. They only display the player count for Steam, which is a microcosm of the total number of guardians in-game, but you can use it as a baseline and extrapolate from there. The trend is somewhat similar across all platforms, so if Steam players are going down, it’s fairly safe to assume the same is happening on consoles as well.
These two websites been collecting statistics since October 2019, when Destiny 2 arrived on Steam in Shadowkeep, giving us years of data to revisit for comparisons. They’re also our go-to choice to measure players during the first hours of major content drops, such as expansions, seasons, and events.
Regardless of your choice of website, the data paints a grim picture about Destiny 2‘s player base, which started to plummet after the disappointing release of Lightfall and hasn’t truly recovered since. The slowdown after The Final Shape, the episodic format, and the release of The Edge of Fate all marked turning points for the worst.
