Well, this would happen in any normal season of Destiny 2, but the game is starting its downward slope in terms of players departing. It is not an abrupt drop-off, which is great to see, and it’s still performing well a month after its final update, Monument of Triumph. But there’s the rub, the final update. Nothing else is coming here for the formerly live game.

Another game in the live-service shooter genre, Warframe , has been running in parallel with Destiny for ages, maintaining perhaps greater consistency over time, and still surviving, even thriving to this day. But rather than celebrate a “win” over the departed Destiny , it’s making its higher-ups sad and nervous. Some new comments come from Warframe Creative Director Reb Ford in an interview with GamesRadar at the recent TennoCon:

"It's horrible news, because it shows that even if you care so much, the business side of this industry always gets the last remark.”

"Those are the types of stories and experiences that, when you're in a position where you have your own game, your own IP, and you work as hard as you do on it... That's not the first time it's happened, and it'll happen again, where the business aspect of the video game economy makes the decision for you, and it is existentially threatening at every level, because the idea that we aren't in charge of our own goodbye is something I wake up thinking about every single day."

In the case of Destiny , there were years-long plans for the second game, and if it was up to the devs at Bungie, most would eagerly have hopped on board the production of a Destiny 3. But cost, cost, cost killed the game, partly due to poor management decisions that exacerbated those costs, and partly due to the baseline of a game that requires such an enormous investment to maintain endless live content. As I’ve previously reported, there have only been a few times in its history that Destiny 2 has been profitable.

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Right until the end, you could feel the passion of the Destiny devs with an exceptional final update that put the game in its best state in years…right before there was no more new content to play. The player surge was higher than both of the last two expansions despite almost nothing new to play, and again, it maintains good numbers after a month. But those will continue falling, which cannot be helped.

Ford may be right to be nervous about the state of the industry and working on a very similar game. Warframe’s Digital Extremes does not have to answer to Sony, however, and costs are not at the same level as Destiny . But they’ve figured out a sustainable groove, and there’s no sign of the game ending any time remotely soon.

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