October was a big month for Destiny 2, with its Shadowkeep expansion launching at the beginning of the month followed by the usual activity that a new expansion and new season bring to the game. Not only that, but Shadowkeep and the beginning of Year 3 marked the official beginning of a Bungie on its own, self-publishing and developing the game's content without the help of its former publishing partner Activision and its studios.
And as a part of that move away from Activision, Destiny 2 moved from Blizzard's Battle.net launcher and moved onto Steam. Now that the numbers are in from October, that migration of players and new offering of Shadowkeep as well as the new free-to-play version of the game known as New Light made some major waves on Steam.
Destiny 2 nabbed the top spot for October's Steam releases in both the paid and free categories. According to Steam, Destiny 2 peaked at nearly 300,000 concurrent players just days after it launched on October 1st and the game has held strong near the top of the list of most played games on Steam.
There's little doubt that those stats were helped by the fact that Destiny 2's established playerbase moved from Battle.net to Steam in a full-on transfer from one service to the other. However, it also appears that Bungie's decision to offer a free-to-play entry point in the form of Destiny 2: New Light had a significant impact to, at the very least, engage with the game.
Steam shared an interesting stat, saying that Destiny 2 caught the attention of people who played other Top Releases on Steam, with 20% of players who played at least one other of the Top Releases also played Destiny 2 in October. As of today, November 25th, when this report was posted by Steam, Destiny 2 remains the fourth most played game with a peak today of more than 103,000 players. That trails behind the third-place Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's 619,000+ players, but Destiny 2 had almost double the player count of fifth place Team Fortress 2.
As Destiny 2 moves forward into Season 9 on December 10th and the rest of Year 3 beyond it, it will be interesting to see how those numbers hold up. Shadowkeep and the migration to Steam were huge for Destiny 2, so it is somewhat unsurprising that the game would tip the scales, but it is nonetheless very impressive that it took the very top spot with its debut on Steam.
Destiny 2: Shadowkeep is available now for PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One.
Source: Steam