Bungie admits that Destiny is struggling to attract new players

Developer and publisher Bungie has said that its smash hit sci-fi MMO Destiny has fallen short when it comes to bringing in new players.

Speaking to IGN, game director Tyson Green said that there had been a “hardening” in the MMO’s audience, saying that while there is no shortage of engaged users, fewer and fewer of them are newcomers to the shooter.

“For years now, Destiny has been on this steady hardening of the core [audience],” Green said.

“More and more core players are staying and playing the game, but relatively few [new] people come into the game. There’s a tightening and contraction, and this presents problems for a game that you’re trying to maintain as a live service, especially when you want to keep serving those core players with great, compelling expansions.”

More recently, Bungie has struggled to please its core audience. The decade-long Light and Darkness saga came to a climax with The Final Shape expansion, while the studio kicked off a new Fate saga with The Edge of Fate expansion, which launched in July. While Bungie tried to feature content that its core players might enjoy, the fans did not find it satisfying. As a result, the studio says that it has doubled down on listening to what its audience wants.

“We looked at the problem that we had [after The Final Shape], and we said: ‘We think there’s a route here,’ which is leaning into more systems of pursuit, getting new tiers of gear, armor sets, and power progression, and things like challenge customization,” Green explained.

“These things that can allow a core audience of players to really say, like, ‘I’m really gonna take this game and put it through its paces, and get good rewards for it.’

He continued: “It sounds great on paper, but it didn’t work. I think we’ve been taught a bunch of hard lessons about what our players want, and there are really two kinds of live games: those that listen to the players and respond, and those that don’t. And we don’t want to be a dead live game, we want to keep building Destiny. So we’re listening to our players, and what our players are telling us is that they don’t want to chase a simple number that goes up, they want real rewards.”

Destiny launched back in 2014, with a sequel coming in 2017. In 2022, developer Bungie was acquired by Sony Interactive Entertainment, who recently said that Destiny 2 failed to meet its expectations.