Destiny 2’s final update sparks huge Steam surge as support ends

Destiny 2’s farewell patch did not land like a quiet shutdown. As Bungie wound active development down with Monument of Triumph on June 9, the game jumped to more than 164,000 concurrent Steam players, a sharper spike than last year’s Edge of Fate expansion ever managed.

That surge came with a second signal of demand: Destiny 2 also became Steam’s top seller that day after a sale cut the full game to $26 in the United States and £22 in the United Kingdom. At the same time, a petition asking Sony and Bungie to greenlight Destiny 3 had passed 370,000 signatures, underscoring how much unfinished business still hangs over the franchise even as the current game reaches its last major chapter.

Bungie framed Monument of Triumph as a sendoff built to welcome people back, not just a hard stop. The studio said Destiny 2 would stay playable after active development ends, just as the original Destiny did, and that the final update would refresh loot across PvE, PvP, and destinations, bring Pantheon back as a permanent activity, and reopen rewards and cosmetics from past seasonal holiday events. Bungie also said its public developer blog, This Week in Destiny, would end after the post-launch window, a sign that the live-service cadence is ending along with the content pipeline.

The timing helps explain why the response was so intense. Destiny 2 launched in September 2014, which gives Monument of Triumph the weight of nearly twelve years of accumulated routines, raids, resets, and seasonal logins. Blizzard Watch reported that Bungie had originally planned a Shadow and Order content update for March 2026 before it was delayed to June, so the final stretch already carried a sense of limbo before the end became official.

That context matters because the Steam spike is not just a comeback story. PC Gamer noted the game had not been this active on Steam since Episode: Echoes launched in June 2024, and April 2026 daily peaks had been under 13,000 before the final update arrived. The jump says as much about ritual as it does about retention: players showed up for one last tour through familiar systems, familiar loot, and familiar closure.

Bungie may be turning its focus toward incubating new games, but Destiny 2’s last big beat proved the community still knows how to gather when the lights start going out.