In fall 2022, Bungie had a problem on its hands. The Destiny 2 developer hasn't gone a single day without some kind of problem lurking somewhere, but this was a big one. As principal technical designer Alan Blaine explained at a Game Developers Conference talk titled "Rescuing a Playerbase from the Doldrums: ‘Destiny 2’ in 2022,'" the game was dipping and needed a solution.
Weekly active users fall between expansion and season releases, "that's pretty standard for most live services, but starting in September 2022 and continuing through November, our weekly active users dropped lower and faster than we'd seen since 2018 with no known cause," Blaine said. "Similarly, player sentiment was also falling lower and faster than we'd seen." (The perennial boogeyman in Destiny 2 is seasonal fatigue, and I don't think Blaine is putting his head in the sand here, but rather saying there was no smoking gun, hot button issue driving players away.)
