[i] Please read the whole post before you comment. Don’t waste everyone’s time with an ignorant reply. If it’s too long don’t read it, feel free to scroll on to the next post. The TLDR is in the spoiler at the end.[/i] Historically the player base in Destiny has dipped between new content drops then climbed back up for about a month or two when a new expansion is released then slowly comes back down. In Destiny 1 the playerbase stayed active between releases and millions of players played everyday. Because of all the changes in Forsaken that are causing players to quit I have been paying closer attention to the player numbers on Destiny Tracker since Forsaken launched. This last week I recorded the numbers every day. Yes I know Destiny Tracker’s data is imperfect. It’s also the only public player data available so it’s what we have. Because most players will play both PVP and PVE, and apparently Gambit counts towards both totals, it’s not accurate to add the two together to get the total number of players that day. To me the best way to approach the numbers is to look at PVE as the number of people playing that day and PVP for specifically what the population is (across 3 platforms) in PVP when discussing that aspect of the game. [b][i]The Numbers![/i][/b] After adding a ton of new players during Forsaken and giving the game away for free the total number of people who have played the game is up to 13.5 million. That’s a great number, but what reveals the health of the game is how many people are still playing the game. The last month of Forsaken has been pretty consistent with between 900K-1.3m PVE players a day. PvP has been dropping but not drastically. [b]Here are the numbers for the last week-[/b] The last 2 Days of the Forsaken>Season 5>Black Armory: Sunday - 1.3m PVE - 950K PVP Monday - 1.1m PVE - 835k PVP Tuesday Black Armory Launches. The first Forge is the only new content. I was too busy on Wednesday to record the Tuesday numbers but I bet they were in the 1.4-1.5 million range. Wednesday - 1.4m PVE - 920K PVP That’s only and increase of 100K players over the weekend before new content, but it is a weekday. Thursday - 1.2 m PVE - 877K PVP Okay no need to panic but this is lower than the weekend before new content. It is 200k down from the previous day. Still a week day. FRIDAY - 1.2m PVE - 899K PVP This is the day they launch the new raid, the second forge, and it’s the first day of the weekend. It is also lower than the weekend before Black Armory launched. Saturday - 900K PVE - 630K PVP I had to check the site over and over again through out the day to believe it. This is a loss of roughly 500k players in three days. This is truly scary. Sunday - Unavailable. There was an update to the Destiny servers Monday to prepare for an update on Tuesday and I will assume this messed with the API and made it so Destiny Tracker couldn’t pull data for Sunday. I’ve said before I don’t believe that Bungie blocked the API to hide the player numbers, but looking at the data from this week I do think that they have something to hide. For the first time I can remember player engagement is going DOWN on a week where new content is released. A lot of people on the forums are dismissive of critics of the games direction. They suggest that people who aren’t happy with the games direction are too casual and should just quit playing. Over the life of D2 the game has lost its 13.5 million total players and is seeing around 10-15% playing daily. Even if you personally like the games direction these numbers should be concerning when it comes to the future of the franchise. I’m not saying Destiny is dead. I am not saying Bungie can’t improve the games quality of life and being back players they lost (again). I am saying that a year ago as a Destiny fan I could not have imagined a time would come where less people played the game on a weekend after a new “dlc” was released and a new raid was out. That happened though. It’s a bad sign for the futures of the game. Edit: [b]Here are the numbers from reset day/The Dawning Launch. [/b] PVE - 965k - PVP - 704K We have all the people from the North Eastern US back now. It’s the reset day. There is a new event for all players not just pass owners. If everyone was busy taking Finals last week and couldn’t play they should be done now. It’s a reset day so everyone should be back for new milestones...I think that covers all the lame excuses I’ve seen in the replies. [spoiler] Here are the PVE numbers for the last week. Sunday - 1.3m Monday -1.1m Tuesday - Didn’t check on Wednesday too busy. Wednesday - 1.4m Thursday - 1.2m Friday - 1.2m Saturday - 900K Sunday - unavailable Monday - 1.0m Tuesday reset/dawning - 965k That’s a 500k drop in three days. [/spoiler]