Destiny 2’s Into the Light is definitely a hit. Players have seemed to generally like the mid-season content drop, but now we have some numbers to back that up.

On Steam, we can now see that Into the Light actually drop more players than the launch of Season of the Wish back in November, 134,000 to 103,000. It actually nearly reached Season of the Deep’s launch as well, which had 145,000. Destiny 2 has been dipping in and out of the Top 10 on Steam for the first time in months, and it’s clear this is a very, very successful content drop. The launch is also not far from the release of the larger 30th Anniversary pack three years ago in December 2021, which drew around 155,000 players at its peak.

So, why is the playercount so high? A few reasons.

• It’s free. All of it. Destiny 2 has been notoriously pretty terrible at offering free content in its allegedly free-to-play game, but Into the Light’s Onslaught activity and its subsequent rewards are all free. That’s opposed to season launches which are $10 to do most of the stuff in them, even if they are much larger from an activity and story perspective compared to Into the Light.
• Onslaught is good. It’s a really solid activity, the horde mode that players have wanted practically since Destiny 1 launched. It’s easy to hop into one of the three lengths and difficulties and have a good time no matter your level of skill. The rewards are also good, power crept versions of classic weapons (well, some got nerfed, RIP Recluse), and it’s fun to get those and hunt for shiny versions of them, a new concept.
• The Final Shape reveal stream was killer. It was full of surprises like the new Prismatic subclass and the new enemy race, The Dread. It got players hyped unlike anything I’d seen since probably the Witch Queen reveal, and I think that caused a lot of people to boot up Into the Light literally the moment the stream ended, as the biggest day was indeed the day it launched.

What’s amazing about this is that Onslaught was developed on a very short timetable. Unlike the long-planned 30th Anniversary content, this had to be whipped up on a much shorter timeframe as the delay of The Final Shape came with later notice. And this also was developed in part after widespread layoffs that reduced headcount and hurt morale internally. But Bungie rallied and have produced both a great free activity and content drop here, and now players are much more confident The Final Shape is shaping (ha) up to be great. Cool to see in a year that has been full of a lot of negativity since Lightfall’s launch.

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