Destiny 2 reaches all-time Steam player record after Lightfall launch

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Lightfall is Destiny 2's biggest-ever expansion launch - judging by PC player count, at least

Destiny 2: Lightfall
(Image credit: Bungie)

Destiny 2 now has more concurrent players on Steam than ever before, as players dive into Lightfall in droves.

The Destiny 2 Lightfall expansion launched just a few hours ago, and even with the early server troubles the game quickly reached over 300,000 concurrent players - the first time the game has crossed that threshold in the 3.5 years it's been on Valve's platform. As of this writing, there are 316,354 players in-game on Steam, as SteamDB shows.

Destiny 2 migrated from the Battle.net launcher over to Steam when the game went free-to-play back in 2019, and the record 292,513 players the game reached at the time had not been topped until today. The nearest number was 290,112 concurrent players, a record set with the launch of The Witch Queen. Obviously, these are just PC numbers, and fan-made cross-platform population trackers weren't up and running as of press time.

Minus stats for the other platforms, this isn't an end-all, be-all for ranking the relative popularity of Destiny 2 expansions, but the stat does indicate that the Lightfall hype is big. (After all, that Lightfall setup cutscene had the GamesRadar+ office "hootin' and hollerin'.")

Destiny 2 tends to have bigger peaks and valleys than many other live games, with tons of players dropping in to see a new expansion then dropping off quickly as the game settles into its regular rotation of seasonal content. We'll see soon enough how the patterns shake out post-Lightfall.

For now, let's raise a glass for the Destiny 2 seasonal content that's gone forever.

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.