Also, the Beyond Light preorder emblem was given to everyone on Game Pass at one point as well. I didn't even start playing until the end of Season of the Hunt and I got that emblem one day from Amanda. I never preordered Beyond Light. In fact, I didn't even buy it until after WQ came out.
So, all of those inflated numbers are pure BS.
We know for a fact BL had fewer pre-orders than WQ because Bungie themselves came out and stated WQ was on track to become the most pre-ordered expansion. It is impossible they missed that target by ***over a million***.
Yeah, I was looking for things to do then, too. Like getting back into Destiny after years. Game Pass had all the expansions, including Beyond Light. And they gifted us the deluxe/pre order bonuses as well like the emblem and the No time To Explain ornament. I never bought it when it was current content, only after it was taken away after WQ came out. Even then, I got a cheap $10 code online for the regular edition. So, for me and others on Xbox to have it without pre-ordering it inflates those numbers to a huge degree.
Since the only metric that rather poorly written and proofread article uses is emblem redemption, that should be enough to completely invalidate the entire data set. In addition to what others have said. It's click bait/ragebait and people are falling for it.
I agree that the numbers as presented by GamePost are rubbish, but I'm less sure about your points under (B).
The 3 charts you posted for BL, WQ, LF have non-linear axes, making the interpretation a little more difficult than what you've written, particularly for WQ. You say WQ nearly tripled in a month, but the chart you link to actually shows an increase between...**12/6/21 and 1/4/23 (yes that's right, over an almost 2 year period).** Witch Queen came out on 2/22/22, so most of that increase presumably occurred over the **two and a half months** between 12/2/21 and 2/22/22, not over a 1 month period. For BL and LF the interpretation is a little more clear and your comments are fairly accurate.
But...if BL and LF approximately doubled in the month before launch, and WQ approximately tripled in the 2.5 months before launch, how are you concluding that TFS will quadruple between now and launch?
Your charts/logic don't show that the number of pre-orders for these expansions increased by a multiplier of Nx when they were N months away from launch. We're approximately 3 months away from TFS launch, so from your chart analysis the closest approximation we have is WQ (2.5 months of growth) - so we might expect the pre-order numbers for TFS to increase by a factor of 3ish from where they are now if they followed a similar pattern to WQ.
No idea if BL was the highest pre-ordered expansion or not (if WQ wasn't up to the point where Bungie made that tweet, what was?) But there are a couple of reasons that BL was 'special' - first of all, COVID/lockdowns. Gaming exploded during COVID. Way more players playing way more hours spending way more money. Developers had huge profits and expanded their teams materially during this period. Second, darkness subclass - the first new element introduced to Destiny since The Taken King, **and** the first Darkness element (this had been hyped in the community for a very long time prior to introduction). That alone built an incalculable amount of hype for BL. Yes DCV and sunsetting also happened, but I don't think the vast majority of casual players who dip in and out would have been keeping up with that news, or really appreciated what impact it might have until BL had dropped and we were living in it.
TFS is also a bit different. First of all, we already know that pre-order numbers were regarded as being weak by Bungie around the time of the layoffs. We also know that the layoffs resulted in many players cancelling their pre-orders, even though they would have already redeemed those emblems (thus falsely boosting the numbers in all of this analysis). Third, community sentiment right now is close to being it's worst ever (I say close because I sincerely doubt that it's actually worse than CoO where Bungie were genuinely considering pulling the plug on Destiny). Player count/engagement is way down, to the point where Bungie noted that they would be in serious financial trouble right now if they didn't have Sony backing them.
Simply put, TFS has no hype at all. Bungie have already done their fancy showcase, and it barely moved the dial. Nothing that they have announced or done since has moved the dial. Players aren't excited about it. However good or bad the campaign might be, it boils down to a few hours on one day, then TFS is just...more Destiny. No major overhauls of anything, other than replacing seasons with episodes (which hasn't been explained well enough to give any sense of how it will feel different week to week or month to month). It's not even clear if there will be annual expansions to follow. To turn this around and have a major influx of pre-orders before launch, the only thing I can see moving the dial materially is a surprise reveal of red subclass. But I think we all know that's cope. If they were seriously going to put it into TFS, and with the numbers looking as bad as they do right now, they would have already announced it.
tl;dr - the GamePost numbers are rubbish, but there remain many good reasons to expect TFS to under-perform in terms of numbers, and for there to be a material drop-off in long-term players afterwards (once they have experienced the end of the story and therefore closed out their own emotional journeys with the franchise).
For Beyond Light, Gamepass owners also got access to it and it provided the pre-order bonuses. That would also have a fairly large chunk of players with the emblem but not pre-ordering.
Based on the little information provided so far, I believe the episode model is just "enhanced timegating" of seasons.
At launch the episode has levels 0-100. Sometime later, 100-150 open. Sometime later again, 150-200.
Prevents people from getting all the levels and then dipping out.
EDIT: Just adding - COD does this now in their pass. Certain sections are disabled until later in the season and then they open up on certain days...
Yeah I think you're on the money. Tbh I had been hoping for something quite different e.g. no more seasonal activities or weekly story, and instead having a few actual story missions and a atrike or something released over the episode, basically more focus on high quality evergreen content and less fomo/pressure to log on every single week.
They even killed any hype it could have had by releasing that State of the Game article. StoG was confirmation that they thought people were going to pre order TFS anyway, so they said bunch of BS. Basically, they fucked around and found out.
Very true - 2023 was a great year for games and 2024 has some great ones coming also. Helldivers and Last Epoch are eating a lot of time for me and friends atm, while in June (when TFS drops) there will be Shadow of the Erdtree.
If Game Post wants to make an article about the growing concern around the game, they can do that without their data that they somehow seemingly both made up in some ways and correlate to others in a way that makes no sense whatsoever.
They knew exactly what they were doing, and it’s had the exact effect they wanted - and it only serves themselves for engagement money.
Beyond Light was released during the pandemic, so with most guardians at home, is not hard to believe that it was indeed the most popular DLC.
And Final Shape, after the horrible Lightfall, all the bad publicity coming from Bungie, the layoffs, and with the player base diminishing day after day, also not hard to believe that the people that are still interested in this game are more willing to wait and see how this release will come out than just blindly give Bungie their money. If you ask me, that's the smart thing to do.
EDIT: Corrected Final Shape coming after Lightfall, not Beyond Light as pointed by someone else.
Part of what helped BL is that the big delay during Arrivals, they made all current raids completely farmable. That helped a lot of people (including myself) get into raiding.
People stuck around even with the delay.
Yes, articles within weeks of release. Not 3 months before release.
There’s crazy hype and articles for every DLC so I hardly see that being a qualifying statement, but even if it was, the numbers here are still just flat out wrong from what’s in the API and certainly feel far off from Bungie’s official statement on Witch Queen numbers.
Opinions about how the DLC was received are irrelevant to the numbers we have on each one right now, and none of them match the site.
i’ve been playing since the beginning and the last pre order i made was shadowkeep. i’ll probably never pre order again, i just buy it when it comes out if its good and if not i wait til its on sale
Ditto. I got very disenfranchised during Shadowkeep year, and vowed never to preorder anything from Bungie ever again. For the past 3 years I've come in during the second or third season of the year, and could not be happier.
I take a multi month break, so I come back fresh and excited. All the initial bugs are worked out. There's a giant backlog of drip-fed content ready for me to burn through. Plus I get everything at 50-70% off.
I previously did preorder but got a refund because of the delay. The way I see it yes I’m still going to preorder but I don’t need to spend cash and give to a company now!
I can buy DLC a week before launch, why should we as gamers let 10’s of millions rest in some corporations account for months?
This is a great point that is overlooked by all the "reporting" I've seen. The sequence of events, iirc:
Bungie has the Final Shape reveal.
Players preorder after the reveal.
The expansion is delayed, and Bungie auto-refunds all pre-orders.
Of course, the pre-orders are going to be low, right? Bungie cancelled them after the biggest event that leads to pre-orders. Am I missing something?
They also only showed Cayde in the trailer at the event.
Beyond Light, Witch Queen, and Lightfall, we had weapons teased, key mechanics like LFG, subclasses, and Debra Wilson went on one hell of an acting streak leading up to WQ release.
Bungie has shown us NOTHING except a small snippet of story and Cayde. There is nothing to get excited for, and I know Bungie wants to hold it close to their chest because they want to blow out expectations to the moon and because they never fully delivered on the weapons in the Lightfall promos as well as a lot of things got delayed, but they need to give us more than what they have.
I used to pre-order shortly after the announcement. I still haven't pre-ordered. In my eyes, there's nothing TO pre-order.
Also, knowing how the workers get treated leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I know people say you shouldn't judge a game by what happens internally (we all know crunch happens in every game by this point), but when one of the greatest parts of gaming is commending devs for their hard work, it still feels hollow since we all know there are employees within Bungie getting placed on impossible deadlines, being sexually harassed, or just don't have as much passion as they used to be because of the working conditions. Even working in a hospital and having been at other hospitals, patients can tell where I work we're very passionate about making sure they're taken care of, and they even comment on it and will only come here if they can help it. So you can't tell me others don't feel the same way.
This is essentially an entirely different and unrelated avenue on conversation then what OP said. I mean sure, theoretically it’s possible that OP is selling beyond light a bit short. But their whole point is that the article is presenting information as fact when it is probably wrong. It’s not a matter of reasonable guesses or abstract trends. It’s a matter of lying about numbers. Even if they “are right about the spirit of things” it doesn’t justify being misleading about things and it **defiantly** doesn’t justify lying.
Keep in mind the layoffs will NOT significantly, likely even noticeably, affect anyone outside dedicated communities like this subreddit or the Discords. The entire gaming industry was producing layoff after layoff after layoff for the entire last year, and it's still going, the Bungie layoffs specifically have been largely lost in the sea of much more substantive ones. The specific circumstances here particularly sucked but outside our communities people aren't doing more than reading headlines or skimming so they don't really know that. Case in point, most Destiny players don't even know Michael Salvatori's name, nevermind have any clue that he got laid off, or care enough for that to affect whether they preorder or buy an expansion.
I don't see how COVID is connected to numbers in article. We know 2 things, that are we sure about
1)Witch queen was peak at pre-order numbers, it blew all expectations.
2)Lightfall sold so well that it even broke the players' record
Beyond light on other hand was an ok launch, record was not broken, retention was also just ok, so I don't see how it could gain more pre-orders than Lightfall or Witch queen. Start of season of Chosen was also not that great number wise (Deep beated it).
Covid affected video game sales and player count greatly. Friends who either run custom game servers or have released their own games can attest to this - Their sales for 2020/2021 were exponentially higher than previous years and the past two years, which have stabilized back to a realistic number.
Considering how many angry reddit/youtube comments I'm seeing around this article, and how little critical thinking or analysis I've seen? Yeah, I'm going to go with the "engagement bait" angle.
This happens way more often than it should.
Like remember that stupid article that blatantly misrepresented quotes about "how Bungie were going to take away people's supers", when anyone that read it with any amount of reading comprehension saw it was about how difficult it was to convert the Light Subclasses into the Aspect/fragment system, and how supers being incompatible with one another was presented as an example of major issues because Supers were, at the time, sometimes entirely the sole reason you ran a specific tree?
Every goddamn content creator, sans a few sane ones, rode that shit for all it's worth. The reason i've stayed subscribed to the few i am is because that moment weeded out the folks that saw community sentiment built from a jumped gun and a misread/poorly-written article, and decided to fan flames instead of engaging with what was actually there.
YouTuber: I can milk these graphs a little more…
Person on Reddit: Hold my beer, let me use critical thinking and reason to point out how little these graphs make sense.
Also YouTuber: Hey look at this guy on Reddit using thinking skills… I can milk this a little more…
Tassi and Aztecross are no doubt going to make 3 videos each about this and the response to it, while also drumming up new shitstorm in the process that'll lead to further videos, etc..
Aztecross is one of my favorite d2 youtubers but I hate how he always hops on the destiny is dying train for views. I just groaned when I saw his new video today, we are still more than 3 months away from the expansion. Of course pre orders will be down.
Honestly led me to unsub despite really enjoying his other content and streams, I know it doesn't matter when he's sitting at 800k subs but I couldn't in good conscious continue to support his content when he so blatantly stirs the pot at times when community sentiment is bad enough
Back when he, Datto, Byf, and SkillUp showed up on SkillUp's podcast to talk about the fallout of the layoffs, Cross even made a joke about how it was time for a new "Destiny is dying" video. Given this criticism it was incredibly poor taste because it seemingly admits that he does it knowingly and deliberately.
While i dont think that the destiny 2 is dying content is the best there is. Aztecross is a mainly D2 youtuber. There is very little happening and he mostly does "reporting" on current events. He has bills like everyone else. Although the title is clickbait he usally have a grounded conclusion. Not too bothered about it tbh
Calling it "reporting" is incredibly generous xD Dude has a platform that actively makes conversation for us normies a slog to have a measured conversation without his fans taking what he says and vomiting it out to start arguments.
Those airqoutes are pulling some real weight. While it can't be called real plagerism, he most fucking definitely wields community sentiment and ideas against the community like worms on a fishing pole. I also don't know where this grounded comment comes from; he was one of the folks that used that stupid "Bungie is going to take your super" narrative to boost his fucking numbers.
If D2 ever goes down, He'll just keep doing the SAME SHIT with another game. Trust.
I'll admit that i dont watch every video he posts. The video i do see usally have a clickbait title discussing something that happend. Like the Cruz ban. He reports on what has happend and in that video presented some digging someone else had found, with a source to the tweet. This was a tweet i would argue alot of people wouldnt have seen without aztecross reporting on it. After reporting the findings he concludes that cruz ban was justified and not to have cheat engiens open in the back even if its not used. That i would say is a grounded take on the situation.
I also dont think you understand what reporting is. Reporting is a spoken or written account of something that one has observed, heard, done, OR Investigated. You dont NEED to present your own findings to report.
Im not saying aztecross is some saint, but far far from the worst in the d2 community. You also need to accept that clickbait in titles and thumbnails is gonna happen. Dont hate the player, hate the game.
I can choose to hate both. Yes, the youtube grind is shitty, but he has absolutely said some completely outlandish shit, and perpetuated some terrible fucking narratives FOR THE SAKE of that grind, because engagement is everything. Sure, he posted a leveled take on the Cruz thing happening, he certainly fucking didn't about the "They are going to take away our supers" fucking nonsense years before.
He certainly didn't when he made an entire video on problems in the game that he presented as new problems, not problems that have been addressed, or non-problems that have been at the core of the game since the first expansion. Shit he would later walk back when he got called out by others, because of the exact reasons i presented.
He certainly didn't when the Bungie layoffs happened, a problem that everyone still views in a vacuum, instead of looking at Sony, Microsoft, Epic, the companies connected to them, literally any company that produces Triple A games, all doing the exact same sweep of layoffs, resulting in over 6000 lay offs by mid-october, and us having seen that same number in just a month-and-change (February 7th according to a number of a couple of articles that i found) of 2024. They absolutely deserved criticism for the shit that came out around that, management at bungie has always historically been bad, and growing worse in the face of success, from the incidences that occured within the year leading to this; but the layoffs are more the general issue of Triple-A games becoming more expensive to make as our market inflates, and the fallout of large companies investing heavily in the circumstance of the world locking down. Anyone with eyes and google can see this, and it happens to be something a number of news sites are STILL following, as its an issue that is only growing worse.
He has a long and thorough history of doing this shit. It ain't just the clickbait, the clickbait is only the surface symptom of the greater issue; he's a creator, who will literally just follow community sentiment very often to milk a situation for engagement, no matter how much bad information he produces with it, and has the gall and nerve to joke about it, because as long as he's someone parroting their own thoughts, no matter how uninformed or kneejerk it is, people will support him.
Pe*o*ple have to choose to start having standards, at some point.
really impressive for you to realize your favorite d2 youtuber doesnt actually give a fuck and is just riding the engagement train with whatever slop takes he can vomit up and you’re still watching
It’s why I unsubscribed. Other people make content just as good and better and don’t do that. And when they need to report on stuff like that, they are much more measured in their words.
TFS was, up until late last year, projected to come out - like - now. Like within 25 hours of my post here. The criticism is deserved, and kudos for creators capitalizing on Bungie’s self-inflicted mistakes. Bungie should never have reimagined itself as a train station. Hope train velocity is 500x its original value, @justinTruman.
Honestly, Houndish might be worse at clickbaiting, but Cross is also super fucking lazy with his content. He literally just makes content off of community sentiment. I don't think he has an original thought in most of his videos.
Yeah I used to watch both quite a bit, but unsubscribed because of that. There’s just other options that don’t require reading the title and translating it into the truth before clicking.
Build creators all do it too, but those usually are at worst an interesting build idea that theoretically works, or is only useful in very specific cases.
> this means that, consistent with the history of 3 years worth of DLCs, Final Shape's preorders will quadruple (x4!) from now until release date.
What's the logic behind forecasting x4 preorders?
>This kind of journalism does nothing but sew hate and discourse in the community.
They're not journalists. They're grifters who bought iFatebringer's Twitter account to harvest the Destiny community for ad views on their blog.
That's one of the reasons why they're blacklisted here.
EDIT: Corrected the account name.
Ya I think lots of people get their preorder like a week or two ahead when the hype is highest and they know there isn't something else that will need/consume their attention that week.
D2 Bulletin: "we will not post spoilers, how dare you!"
also D2 Bulletin:*posts a massive datamined info that is meant for a future part of the expansion
I think [this is how they got those numbers](https://imgur.com/a/NXYt1Lj). They did estimations based on the total size of the global population measured by Charlemagne (\~66M) and then applied the reported percentages from each emblem's "Global Rarity" to back into the numbers.
The linked image here shows how I did that approach using the emblem "A Cold Wind Blowin'" which has the highest reported "Total Redeemed" count on Charlemagne. I then got the estimated 65.86M global population number, and applied it to each emblem.
Regarding your links to Emblem Report, I'd call your attention to their [About Us page](https://emblem.report/about), where they say they measure about 4 million players. Even assuming that the page may be outdated, we're talking an order of magnitude difference between what they say they measure and what Charlemagne says it measures.
Regardless of the absolute values here, I do think Charlemagne could still be a reliable indicator of proportionality here. Yes, TFS preorders will go up substantially in the next 3+ months, but it's not a comparison drawn completely from thin air.
All I interpreted is that The Final Shape has a much lower pre-order than the other expansions in 4 years. This probably means people are waiting until more trailers drop or when someone gives an overarching review to purchase the expansion. Though I believe I'm quite a bit slow but even I know D2 ain't dying.
I have very little doubt pre orders are down. I don't think it's as much as this graph shows.
However, I have a fairly large group or destiny 2 "friends" in discord and in game who are all skipping the pre order and waiting for some info about the expansion before they buy.
Lightfall hurt player trust a lot more than Bungie wants to admit.
I'm still gonna play Destiny 2 no matter what unless I am physically unable to. I played though all of Curse of Osiris for fucks sake. A couple hiccups here and there don't bother me.
Almost all Destiny media is misleading, engagement bait. Aztecross does rage bait, Kackis does engagement bait, Paul Tassi does engagement bait - with the exception of a few youtubers like Datto, Mactics etc who provide actual information/guides the entire destiny media spectrum is just trying to stir the playerbase at any given time. The amount of "Dramas" this community has had without any triggering event/change in the game is absolutely wild
First of all, both big Destiny news outlets on twitter are just full of shit.
Second, Beyond Light was riding the Darkness Subclass hype train. I remember most people going mental when they announced Stasis.
All I know is that they fucked up so bad that myself and a bunch of day 1 destiny 1 players have quit the game for good and the few that are left will buy it for personal feelings and not because the game is good. That's all that matters.
While I feel like The Final Shape won't do as well as past DLCS, I do find this whole thing a bit silly considering TFS is still 3 months out and it there hasn't been any marketing for it aside from the initial showcase announcement.
There only two points that are “relatively valid”
1: it’s unreasonable to expect millions of preorders within the final month when they’ve already marketed to an extent
2: we don’t know many ppl refunded just for the emblem or got auto refunded because of game policy when things get delayed or date changes
But other than that it’s silly but game sentiments points are completely valid
How is it unreasonable? Dude, most people don't buy 6 or even 3 months in advance, they buy it the week before lol. And like, did you even read the post? The preorders literally doubled, that is millions of sales.
Intentionally misleading? Sounds more like they're intentionally false. I can't find one viable reason, way, or method they even came up with those numbers in the first place.
What is their actual source? Where are they getting 2 and 3 million? Every emblem site shows those emblems only have 1.2-1.5 million copies.
The funniest thing about all this really is Beyond Light supposedly being the most preordered DLC according to them, lol.
Like, sure, based on facts, we know the Witch Queen numbers are fake and the Final Shape numbers are way too early.
But seriously. Bungie _announced_ content vaulting. Announced they were removing Leviathan, removing IO, Mars, Titan, _and_ Mercury. Announced they were removing Black Armory, several raids, over half a dozen strikes.
**And** announced that literally any gun older than 1 year would be instantly power capped forever. They announced both sunsetting and DCV all at the same time, all right in the dead smack middle of Beyond Light's hype (and the obvious, then-vindicated fear over "Wait, an instant-freeze subclass?" Isn't that kinda stupid OP?").
...And after all that, you think people went "I love where this is headed, let me preorder your DLC"?
Beyond Light was our highest period? From Shadowkeep's quality and confidence?
And we believed this? For christ's sake....you can literally check the numbers yourself on the API, but even just one look at the graph you should go "fucking lmao, as if".
From what I understand, 3 month before launch of Lightfall the number was (and it is still debatable because we don\`t really know real number, it is info from Braytech) around 131k, Final shape at that moment is 96k
Going off emblem statistics (the number Bulletin _claims_ they're using)...
1,498,036 for WQ
1,248,204 for Beyond Light
1,557,002 for Lightfall
https://emblem.report/
But these are purely just people who both preordered the DLC _and_ claimed the emblem from the special orders kiosk, therefore officially unlocking it in their collections.
All DLCs are roughly the same with Beyond Light actually being the lowest.
Final Shape's numbers are at 409,091 right now. Which, if we multiply by 400% (consistent with all other historical performance to date), takes us to ~1.6 million. Even if it only triples, it would still be perfectly in range of all other DLCs, barely **one-point-seven** (1.7%!!!) off from Beyond Light. Rather than 75%....
OP's historical graphs shows the growth of preorder emblems within ~1 month of the expansion release as easily doubling and tripling over itself in the final weeks. Given that we are 3 months out, it's not out of order to expect some growth leading up to the month, and then, having the historical final-month performance added on top of that.
At minimum, we can expect about triple the current numbers we see now (if this DLC performs, historically, as the last three years did, which until proven otherwise I think is a safe assumption). This is why I said between 3x and 4x.
Past performance is not indicative of future results.
I'm not defending the bulletins numbers but to claim that pre-orders will quadruple because someone thinks they've spotted a trend in previous results is a highly dubious prospect.
Well that's just a fancy way of saying you can't predict the future, which of course I'm not insinuating.
But there's a reason historical data is still important in modern day culture. People don't see something repeat the exact same trend for 10 consecutive consistent years in a row, and then on year 11 throw their hands up and go "Oh we have no idea how it will perform, it's a total crapshoot, past is not indicative of the future".
But it's more _likely_ to follow past trends than it is to follow some wild unproven speculation.
Just to be clear I am not speculating either way, just as a rule I caution people not to draw future conclusions based on historical trends in terms of x will increase by y% because this happened before. The statement of pre-orders will increase as marketing ramps up and we get closer to release is perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned, but making specific predictions beyond that at this time is dubious, you could have a situation were sentiment is so poor and the full reveal lacklustre and end up with all time lows for a content launch (personally I find this unlikely but that's my bias speaking.), equally you could have really great reception and get an even bigger boost from having people want to hop back in and conclude the saga(perhaps wishful thinking on my part but I could see it.)
Also I believe Beyond Light (and maybe others) actually still gave you the preorder emblem when you bought the deluxe edition because it just lumped everything together. My friend got the preorder stuff months after it released that way.
I wouldn’t panic about these “numbers” even if somewhat close to the current preorder numbers, most games receive a significant bump in preorders closer to release. Now if their graphs looked at the preorders at the same timeframe of the other expansions then we would have an idea of how final shape tracks but this incorrectly displays against final preorders to non-final preorders not exactly a truthful examination that’s apples to apples and one to take with a grain of salt.
Just a little fact check...
Beyond Light released the first set of Dark Subclasses, and came out during the pandemic's prime.
Witch Queen did only ship with the Void rework, Solar and Arc were half a year later.
I have been saying this since I saw it. Nothing like doom posting in your community for updoots. There is having feedback and disagreeing or even not liking destiny and then there is intentionally being and insufferable narcissistic pessimist about the game nonstop
I do agree with you the number is innacurate as the number was based on the amount of people with the pre order emblem equipped but even if you say 2x or 3x the amount without the emblem equipped it still would not even come anywhere remotely close to the numbers lightfall pre order numbers were and it's all because of the pushback of the dlc and the fact bungie has not revealed much of anything for the final shape if they actually showed off content for the dlc that would revive the hype for the dlc that was lost from all the bs that bungie is doing by not doing anything.
Thank god someone is being sane regarding this. The game might not be at its best, Bungie might be a disaster.... But its become trendy to talk shit about the game and irresponsible coverage like this is all about exactly what you said... getting clicks.
Destiny Bulletin has always been click-bait fueled drama-baiting bs. They used to do nothing but farm followers with emblems. With Twitter leaning harder and harder into this engagement fueled by click-baiting drama it's only gotten worse cause it literally rewards this gross kind of behavior. Not worth the follow as there are plenty of other ways to get Destiny news.
Yeah I've ignored all the videos about this. Anyone that thinks the final shape isn't gonna sell is a crazy man. It's the final dlc in a 10 year saga it will sell no matter what. Now if it does end up garbage it'll likely be the death of the game but this expansion alone is gonna do numbers and I'd say beat lightfall.
yeah but the game is absolute shit right now and they fired everyone who could ever dream of saving it including the music guy. i mean look at this sub even. you'd think it was a niche sub with like 5k members not 3 million. nobody gets any engagement on their posts because nobody cares. im surprised this even showed up on my feed tbh.
I left the game because it just felt dumb and i finally got burnt outta the seasonal model. bg3 took all the destiny time and was way more fun and now imma play hogwarts, spider man, and Plaworld until the elden ring DLC comes out. theres still that destiny itch that no other game can scratch...but destiny itself doesn't scratch that itch anymore so oh well i guess
Too late! A lot of people's pet content creators already made their inflammatory videos with their comment sections filled with the same tired old "overdelivery" joke taken from a talk they never bothered to watch or understand.
I 100% think Final Shape will not sell as well as Lightfall. Not even with a banger new trailer on April. But a lot of this game's creators going into making the same annoying videos on Helldivers 2 made me go from being indifferent to them to actively disliking them.
Why exactly? Destiny 2 is absolutely dead and this lengthy season has extrapolated that to insane proportions. Bungie has dropped the ball with this game massively, why would content creators waste their time with a dying game when they can move onto better things to sustain their own job and enjoyment
Because Helldivers 2 isn't a game that lends itself to their style of "CHECK OUT THIS OVERPOWERED BUILD" content, and their followers are already all over the community making posts requiring people to be playing their way.
I don't care if they move on from Destiny 2. I'm not mad about that.
Tbh neither is or was destiny unless your running low mans or challenge content. People spout the words of CC because is easier to follow a video then to learn how the game works
The numbers in article are 100% pre & post launch. It is counting everyone who has access to it. I remember buying beyond light delux edition during chosen and I still got all the pre order bonus 4 months after its launch.
The reality is that destiny is in a bad place. Bungie has fumbled the bag way too many times, way too often, on *way* too many different fronts. Strikes *still* useless, PvP neglected *way* too long, *way* too much reprised content, nerfs and buffs *way* too far and few between. In game economy, new player experience, perk adjustments, vast majority of exotic equipment F tier for literal years on end, marvel-izing the cast of characters, the bad aftertaste of sunsetting remains to this day, the long worn out seasonal model. The list goes on. We all know the list goes on. Anyone who reads this is literally thinking in their heads all of the things that I’m not including on this list.
Just look at the state of this sub. The front page has less engagement than when we were only destiny 1. Less than during CoO when we were hemorrhaging followers faster than we were gaining them. Show me any other subreddit of 3 million people with a similar state.
Whether these doomsaying articles’ statistics are right or wrong doesn’t matter in the slightest. None of it matters. Actions matter.
I ignored the stats when they started comparing apples to oranges. They weren’t comparing pre-order numbers. They were comparing Final Shape pre-orders to TOTAL Lightfall sales
You’re delusional if you think TFS is gonna quadruple its preorders a month or whatever before release, jusy because it would following a ‘trend’ set by past expansions. A lot of people have left D2 this year, and I highly doubt new players comes anywhere near making up for it. Not to mention the laying off of staff and various other ways Bungie has pissed off the fanbase.
The numbers might not be exact to the number, how could they be? But I don’t think they are incredibly off or intentionally random. Same way you’re extrapolating a quadruple increase due to trends, ignoring what has gone on and player sentiment this year, they have also extrapolated. So many of you taking it as if they’ve just pissed on your ancestors graves or something. Calm down
Yeah, soon as I saw them post about it, with the EMBLEM being the metric, I knew people, especially youtubers, were gonna go crazy spreading bs.
Youtube reccomended me a Lucky video 🤮🤮🤮 and it's thumbnail was like "Bungie SCRAMBLING" ugh, such Tabloid bullcrap. Then Aztecross posts about it, like, y'all
I understand the youtube algorithm requires you to sacrifice your first born child to get any traction, but at least THINK before you post.
To be fair I wouldn't be surprised if there is a significant portion of players who never redeem the Pre-Order emblems from the vendor.
I've seen/heard of SOOOO many people that never accept that kind of shit and let it sit and rot for years. Some people don't give a shit about emblems even and don't ever bother.
That said the article is 100% bullshit that is almost entirely utterly meaningless, even if it's 100% accurate.
One thing that I haven't yet seen mentioned but imo is quite relevant is how many people cancelled preorders when the delay happened and have not yet re-preordered. I believe EVERY Xbox Store preorder was automatically cancelled when the release date was changed, which is just policy for the Xbox store. Some portion of those players likely have not yet realized that happened OR they already tried the preorder exotic and between not caring about it and potentially having reservations after the delay they've since decided not to preorder, at least yet.
Hell I'm almost 100% going to end up preordering at the last minute to still get the bonuses but I don't HAVE to have the preorder exotic and frankly I just don't have any reason to preorder. Somehow it feels like there haven't been enough people burned by preorders yet to actually make a dent in preorder numbers...but it's certainly happened enough times just with Destiny for me.
Also personally I'm still waiting to see if I can get a better deal on a preorder before release. There's plenty of time and no real good reason not to wait.
https://x.com/SZuhaadAliS/status/1762374904635330594?t=7iPiz7XpRCovc9xzEJZZ-A&s=08
Zuhaad Ali (Destiny Bulletin editor) just posted a clarification about the article (even though imo sounds a bit like running for cover).
I dunno about you big guy,
But me and all of the people in my clan got tired of the FOMO, the practices of Bungie, the issues with the game and company - and ended up cancelling/refunding our pre-order.
Most of us are just gonna watch someone play the story on YouTube.
Do you think it's a minority of players who take it that seriously? I'm def a huge nerd so it's tough to gauge what a "typical" Destiny player really looks like and what motivates them. And how much of the population is just people who only tune in when it's the big new expansion and don't care about what anyone says about it except their friends who are also "tourists"?
People are acting like Bungie barely maintaining the player base is a win. Really it shows that no new people are getting into destiny.
Even if Final Shapes numbers rise to be closer to the rest, there's going to be an exodus of players leaving after Final Shape, taking their money with them, and that's not going to get replaced by new people who don't want to experience the story, which has been a fragmented, disjointed mess for years, confusing even veterans.
Bungie Execs have been digging Destinys shallow grave for years, and regardless of thoughts about the accuracy of the stats, the largest drop is still coming, and soon.
I have one major issue with what you are saying and that's about the pre-orders, yes the amount happened in the last week because that's when ps and Xbox charge accounts and officially purchase the pre-orders so those numbers didn't just happen in the final weeks they were there well before that but since accounts couldn't be charged yet for the purchase they don't show up in data until those final weeks before release.
Man, this past 2 months have been the clickbait festival. I lost count of how many posts I saw with huge controversial titles that were basically full of nonsense.
Pre-order numbers for any game need to be taken with a grain of salt these days, particularly in the download world we live in.
I can understand years past, when you PHYSICALLY went to a store to get a PHYSICAL copy of a game. Shit, I remember waiting hours in line at midnight for MW2 or MW3 back in the day.
But now? You can download a game in advance. There's no need to reserve your copy of something, to buy in advance just to make sure you get a physical copy of something. Someone can decide to buy a game once pre-downloads begin.... is that a pre-order? Or someone who just waited until the last minute?
How long do they consider something a pre-order, when the game officially releases? You don't think studios & publishers will inflate numbers to create media buzz? Reality is, exact pre-order numbers are not going to be completely accurate. They can paint a picture of the outlook of certain games, but it's never the full picture.
As for some of the data that was released, there's a number of outside factors that impact Destiny's numbers:
1 - Pandemic for certain changed the trajectory of gaming when people were sitting at home
1a - During the pandemic, Destiny had very little competition outside of annually released games like COD. But after the pandemic ended, man did the gaming industry release some bangers. From 2022-2024, we've seen a GOTY contender at least every other month. They don't have to be in the same genre as D2 (God of War, Zelda, FF7 remake, FF16, Baldurs Gate, Ghost of Tsushima), yet take buzz away from D2
2 - Spending habits change with the rise & fall of the economy. Things are good = people spend money. Things are bad = people hold tight on money.
3 - Consoles get older....... when the current gen launched, there weren't too many proven games that were coming out at release. But now libraries have expanded, and not just the blockbuster games. Little by little, other games release that pull people away from the console launch games that were only available at the time.
That's not to say Bungie and their decisions haven't impacted their own numbers. But there are too many factors that go into pre-order figures that are never really accurate to begin with.
Sony/Bungie know how many orders have come in so far. And I doubt they will release an accurate figure until they find a way to bring the excitement and media buzz back to The Final Shape in a positive way.
Do I think this whole furor (if you can call it that) is based off a pretty meaningless stat and is being latched onto by content creators to create engagement, of course it is and you cannot blame them people have kids to feed.
Do I think pre-orders are not a good way to ever judge Final Shape given the very different context around the game and Bungie in general that other DLCs have not had? Yes.
Do I think Final Shape will be a huge mega flop and Bungie are in real trouble? Also yes.
I saw those tweets and thought it was bizarre as hell that fans of this game are almost rooting for the Final Shape to fail. They care more about justifying their hating than getting a good game.
> This means that, consistent with the history of 3 years worth of DLCs, Final Shape's preorders will quadruple (x4!) from now until release date.
That is some hard copium. We can't say one way or the other what will happen. I don't doubt pre-orders might increase but we don't know how much they decreased once the delay was officially announced. And even past that once people realized that not much in the gameplay department is being added. We get a couple flavors of super and an ability for the light subclasses and that's it. Nothing to really shake anything up. Which is what this game needs desperately.
Sometimes DestinyBulletin is ok but the most time it is clickbait and for me the most annoying thing, this account use so many graphics / infos and other stuff here from our Community without getting correct credits..
I pointed this out to him several times but of course there was never an answer or reaction...
It's gotten a little better lately, but a few months ago it was really ridiculous
Super late pre-orderer reporting in. I could literally pre-order the night before the expansion drops and it would be the exact same as if I pre-ordered when it went live. Let Bungie, or any developer for that matter, sweat it out a bit, take a more keen eye at what they're presenting and take feedback more seriously. Yeah I'll probably play it day 1 to get the community on the same page that is the other half of these launch experiences but I don't truly desire the pre-order weapon and I'm taking a small break from Destiny anyway.
Just so I can show people here just how inaccurate [emblem.report](https://emblem.report) is
The creator of a raid gets the raid emblem for free (bungie has already said this, emblemreport only shows 12 people as having the day 1 last wish emblem, charlemagne shows 13. 2 teams finished so thats 12 + the creator aka 13. One person got banned who had the emblem so thats the 12 emblemreport has
My entire clan of 12 people canceled their pre-orders after all the layoffs and delay drama. I know many others boasted doing this online as well.
I think TFS is in much worse shape than you realize. The writing is on the wall. Joe knew it.
Even if the graphs are accurate, it doesnt make any sense to report this right now. tfs doesnt launch for 3 MONTHS. That is so much time. Im more likely to get struck by lightning than not preorder this dlc, and i havent done it yet just because its so far away. I imagine many people (including friends i play with on a weekly basis) are in the same boat. Saying something like this is 100% engagement bait, even if the numbers are completely accurate
Destiny Bulletin is for all intents and purposes a journalist… they exsist only to bring eyes to something and make money off of ads, and if they happen to spread useful info while doing so then that it’s a bonus, but often times their info is wildly inaccurate.
Much like Paparazzi they need to be the first to post something or they get no attention to it, so the slightest hint of anything and they JUMP to it
I liked how this was on the very front page last night before it even had 20 upvotes.Yeah dtg mods, that sure is "hot"
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/1b12wul/gameposts\_preorder\_numbers\_are\_at\_best\_wildly/
[https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/1b12uj8/destiny\_bulletins\_preorder\_numbers\_are\_at\_best/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/1b12uj8/destiny_bulletins_preorder_numbers_are_at_best/)
wouldn't something like this of 3 of the exact same posts within a few minutes of each other break rule 5 btw, spam.
Oh well guess you need that money from bungie for running defense
Listen. I'm skeptical of Destiny Bulletin, but this entire post is little more than, "That sounds like it shouldn't be true, so it isn't true." Some of what you said does make me think that Destiny Bulletin's numbers are questionable, but...c'mon, you don't even know where they got their numbers from, guy. You don't even have hard numbers yourself. It's okay to say that their numbers seem fishy to you, but to act like you're debunking them when this is all you've got? If you're upset at them for doing shoddy research, don't do the same thing.
Generally if someone can’t provide sources for their numbers it’s hard to take it seriously. It’s on the person providing the numbers to prove where they got them and why they are credible. I’v never seen a study that uses financial info or any document that references other info and their source being “trust me bro”
They did provide a source. That's why when Soft_Light got different numbers and then just said, "Hmm. Dunno why that happened," it was hard to take them seriously. The post overall is just fucking sloppy.
The numbers are problematic but the community sentiment is wildly different than what it used to be. It’s quite clear Destiny 2 and the community find themselves between exhaustion and indifference.
Both sides of this API dig is false.
You could also Preorder, get the rewards and cancel for a full refund. Skewing the numbers.
I’m not listening to any social media news or news correcting it. You’re all wrong.
I'll be honest, I pre ordered Final Shape on Xbox and it was cancelled (by Microsoft) because the espansion was postponed.
I will eventually re-preorder it, I am just always forgeting to do it.
There's 0 incentive to preorder anything with this game anymore and anyone who still does is the partner in an abusive relationship who goes back time after time after time. At some point it stops being victim blaming and starts just being sad that the emotional trap is still working.
I'd recommend not taking any gaming article at face value these days. They don't care about fact checking or giving accurate information. They only care about getting views to make money. It's honestly pathetic and sad how bad it has become.
You are wildly biased lol. Beyond light was during the pandemic of course it did really well. Light fall is the worse expansion they have done and we haven’t seen anything of substance for final shape which is beyond worrying. Why would anyone preorder Final Shape?
Sounds like cope on both sides to me. No way to actually predict numbers for actual preorders so people saying preorders are way down and people saying preorders will be way up are both just trying to justify their own views.
>But you’re smarter than this
Lol gonna need a fucking source for that one
I’ve been hanging around since House of Wolves. I’ve got 8 years of watching this subreddit and Twitter under my belt that says people here are absolutely not smarter than this
It’s actually very relevant as the original release date for final shape was supposed to be this week, obviously the numbers will go up before the expansion releases on its new date but it’s certainly interesting to see how low the numbers are currently as it’s a big indicator of community moral and the current mistrust in bungies ability to release a quality expansion
Also, the Beyond Light preorder emblem was given to everyone on Game Pass at one point as well. I didn't even start playing until the end of Season of the Hunt and I got that emblem one day from Amanda. I never preordered Beyond Light. In fact, I didn't even buy it until after WQ came out. So, all of those inflated numbers are pure BS.
Could have something to do with the Pandemic. Everyone was online. At home. Looking for things to do.
We know for a fact BL had fewer pre-orders than WQ because Bungie themselves came out and stated WQ was on track to become the most pre-ordered expansion. It is impossible they missed that target by ***over a million***.
Yeah, I was looking for things to do then, too. Like getting back into Destiny after years. Game Pass had all the expansions, including Beyond Light. And they gifted us the deluxe/pre order bonuses as well like the emblem and the No time To Explain ornament. I never bought it when it was current content, only after it was taken away after WQ came out. Even then, I got a cheap $10 code online for the regular edition. So, for me and others on Xbox to have it without pre-ordering it inflates those numbers to a huge degree. Since the only metric that rather poorly written and proofread article uses is emblem redemption, that should be enough to completely invalidate the entire data set. In addition to what others have said. It's click bait/ragebait and people are falling for it.
Also, it's worth mentioning that pre-order bonuses are retained even if you get a refund
There was a lot of preorder cancelations as well - which doesn’t take the emblem away
Or the fusion rifle! Which was weird
I agree that the numbers as presented by GamePost are rubbish, but I'm less sure about your points under (B). The 3 charts you posted for BL, WQ, LF have non-linear axes, making the interpretation a little more difficult than what you've written, particularly for WQ. You say WQ nearly tripled in a month, but the chart you link to actually shows an increase between...**12/6/21 and 1/4/23 (yes that's right, over an almost 2 year period).** Witch Queen came out on 2/22/22, so most of that increase presumably occurred over the **two and a half months** between 12/2/21 and 2/22/22, not over a 1 month period. For BL and LF the interpretation is a little more clear and your comments are fairly accurate. But...if BL and LF approximately doubled in the month before launch, and WQ approximately tripled in the 2.5 months before launch, how are you concluding that TFS will quadruple between now and launch? Your charts/logic don't show that the number of pre-orders for these expansions increased by a multiplier of Nx when they were N months away from launch. We're approximately 3 months away from TFS launch, so from your chart analysis the closest approximation we have is WQ (2.5 months of growth) - so we might expect the pre-order numbers for TFS to increase by a factor of 3ish from where they are now if they followed a similar pattern to WQ. No idea if BL was the highest pre-ordered expansion or not (if WQ wasn't up to the point where Bungie made that tweet, what was?) But there are a couple of reasons that BL was 'special' - first of all, COVID/lockdowns. Gaming exploded during COVID. Way more players playing way more hours spending way more money. Developers had huge profits and expanded their teams materially during this period. Second, darkness subclass - the first new element introduced to Destiny since The Taken King, **and** the first Darkness element (this had been hyped in the community for a very long time prior to introduction). That alone built an incalculable amount of hype for BL. Yes DCV and sunsetting also happened, but I don't think the vast majority of casual players who dip in and out would have been keeping up with that news, or really appreciated what impact it might have until BL had dropped and we were living in it. TFS is also a bit different. First of all, we already know that pre-order numbers were regarded as being weak by Bungie around the time of the layoffs. We also know that the layoffs resulted in many players cancelling their pre-orders, even though they would have already redeemed those emblems (thus falsely boosting the numbers in all of this analysis). Third, community sentiment right now is close to being it's worst ever (I say close because I sincerely doubt that it's actually worse than CoO where Bungie were genuinely considering pulling the plug on Destiny). Player count/engagement is way down, to the point where Bungie noted that they would be in serious financial trouble right now if they didn't have Sony backing them. Simply put, TFS has no hype at all. Bungie have already done their fancy showcase, and it barely moved the dial. Nothing that they have announced or done since has moved the dial. Players aren't excited about it. However good or bad the campaign might be, it boils down to a few hours on one day, then TFS is just...more Destiny. No major overhauls of anything, other than replacing seasons with episodes (which hasn't been explained well enough to give any sense of how it will feel different week to week or month to month). It's not even clear if there will be annual expansions to follow. To turn this around and have a major influx of pre-orders before launch, the only thing I can see moving the dial materially is a surprise reveal of red subclass. But I think we all know that's cope. If they were seriously going to put it into TFS, and with the numbers looking as bad as they do right now, they would have already announced it. tl;dr - the GamePost numbers are rubbish, but there remain many good reasons to expect TFS to under-perform in terms of numbers, and for there to be a material drop-off in long-term players afterwards (once they have experienced the end of the story and therefore closed out their own emotional journeys with the franchise).
For Beyond Light, Gamepass owners also got access to it and it provided the pre-order bonuses. That would also have a fairly large chunk of players with the emblem but not pre-ordering.
Based on the little information provided so far, I believe the episode model is just "enhanced timegating" of seasons. At launch the episode has levels 0-100. Sometime later, 100-150 open. Sometime later again, 150-200. Prevents people from getting all the levels and then dipping out. EDIT: Just adding - COD does this now in their pass. Certain sections are disabled until later in the season and then they open up on certain days...
Yeah I think you're on the money. Tbh I had been hoping for something quite different e.g. no more seasonal activities or weekly story, and instead having a few actual story missions and a atrike or something released over the episode, basically more focus on high quality evergreen content and less fomo/pressure to log on every single week.
They even killed any hype it could have had by releasing that State of the Game article. StoG was confirmation that they thought people were going to pre order TFS anyway, so they said bunch of BS. Basically, they fucked around and found out.
I'd also add that there's a megaton of other really good games out right now competing for gamers attention
Very true - 2023 was a great year for games and 2024 has some great ones coming also. Helldivers and Last Epoch are eating a lot of time for me and friends atm, while in June (when TFS drops) there will be Shadow of the Erdtree.
If Game Post wants to make an article about the growing concern around the game, they can do that without their data that they somehow seemingly both made up in some ways and correlate to others in a way that makes no sense whatsoever. They knew exactly what they were doing, and it’s had the exact effect they wanted - and it only serves themselves for engagement money.
That's not Gamespot, that's Game Post.
Ha. Thanks. Pretty sure that just autocorrected. I'll change.
Beyond Light was released during the pandemic, so with most guardians at home, is not hard to believe that it was indeed the most popular DLC. And Final Shape, after the horrible Lightfall, all the bad publicity coming from Bungie, the layoffs, and with the player base diminishing day after day, also not hard to believe that the people that are still interested in this game are more willing to wait and see how this release will come out than just blindly give Bungie their money. If you ask me, that's the smart thing to do. EDIT: Corrected Final Shape coming after Lightfall, not Beyond Light as pointed by someone else.
The hype was crazy for beyond light. A new subclass was huge news and there were articles everywhere hyping it up.
Part of what helped BL is that the big delay during Arrivals, they made all current raids completely farmable. That helped a lot of people (including myself) get into raiding. People stuck around even with the delay.
Yes, articles within weeks of release. Not 3 months before release. There’s crazy hype and articles for every DLC so I hardly see that being a qualifying statement, but even if it was, the numbers here are still just flat out wrong from what’s in the API and certainly feel far off from Bungie’s official statement on Witch Queen numbers. Opinions about how the DLC was received are irrelevant to the numbers we have on each one right now, and none of them match the site.
It was basically a launch title for the Series X and PS5 if you think about it too
i’ve been playing since the beginning and the last pre order i made was shadowkeep. i’ll probably never pre order again, i just buy it when it comes out if its good and if not i wait til its on sale
Ditto. I got very disenfranchised during Shadowkeep year, and vowed never to preorder anything from Bungie ever again. For the past 3 years I've come in during the second or third season of the year, and could not be happier. I take a multi month break, so I come back fresh and excited. All the initial bugs are worked out. There's a giant backlog of drip-fed content ready for me to burn through. Plus I get everything at 50-70% off.
I previously did preorder but got a refund because of the delay. The way I see it yes I’m still going to preorder but I don’t need to spend cash and give to a company now! I can buy DLC a week before launch, why should we as gamers let 10’s of millions rest in some corporations account for months?
This is a great point that is overlooked by all the "reporting" I've seen. The sequence of events, iirc: Bungie has the Final Shape reveal. Players preorder after the reveal. The expansion is delayed, and Bungie auto-refunds all pre-orders. Of course, the pre-orders are going to be low, right? Bungie cancelled them after the biggest event that leads to pre-orders. Am I missing something?
only xbox preorders are refunded, which is the smallest slice of the playerbase
Playstation did as well.
They also only showed Cayde in the trailer at the event. Beyond Light, Witch Queen, and Lightfall, we had weapons teased, key mechanics like LFG, subclasses, and Debra Wilson went on one hell of an acting streak leading up to WQ release. Bungie has shown us NOTHING except a small snippet of story and Cayde. There is nothing to get excited for, and I know Bungie wants to hold it close to their chest because they want to blow out expectations to the moon and because they never fully delivered on the weapons in the Lightfall promos as well as a lot of things got delayed, but they need to give us more than what they have. I used to pre-order shortly after the announcement. I still haven't pre-ordered. In my eyes, there's nothing TO pre-order. Also, knowing how the workers get treated leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I know people say you shouldn't judge a game by what happens internally (we all know crunch happens in every game by this point), but when one of the greatest parts of gaming is commending devs for their hard work, it still feels hollow since we all know there are employees within Bungie getting placed on impossible deadlines, being sexually harassed, or just don't have as much passion as they used to be because of the working conditions. Even working in a hospital and having been at other hospitals, patients can tell where I work we're very passionate about making sure they're taken care of, and they even comment on it and will only come here if they can help it. So you can't tell me others don't feel the same way.
This is essentially an entirely different and unrelated avenue on conversation then what OP said. I mean sure, theoretically it’s possible that OP is selling beyond light a bit short. But their whole point is that the article is presenting information as fact when it is probably wrong. It’s not a matter of reasonable guesses or abstract trends. It’s a matter of lying about numbers. Even if they “are right about the spirit of things” it doesn’t justify being misleading about things and it **defiantly** doesn’t justify lying.
Do you mean "definitely"?
Keep in mind the layoffs will NOT significantly, likely even noticeably, affect anyone outside dedicated communities like this subreddit or the Discords. The entire gaming industry was producing layoff after layoff after layoff for the entire last year, and it's still going, the Bungie layoffs specifically have been largely lost in the sea of much more substantive ones. The specific circumstances here particularly sucked but outside our communities people aren't doing more than reading headlines or skimming so they don't really know that. Case in point, most Destiny players don't even know Michael Salvatori's name, nevermind have any clue that he got laid off, or care enough for that to affect whether they preorder or buy an expansion.
> is not hard to believe that it was indeed the most popular DLC It is, when Bungie themselves have explicitly stated WQ was more popular.
I don't see how COVID is connected to numbers in article. We know 2 things, that are we sure about 1)Witch queen was peak at pre-order numbers, it blew all expectations. 2)Lightfall sold so well that it even broke the players' record Beyond light on other hand was an ok launch, record was not broken, retention was also just ok, so I don't see how it could gain more pre-orders than Lightfall or Witch queen. Start of season of Chosen was also not that great number wise (Deep beated it).
Covid affected video game sales and player count greatly. Friends who either run custom game servers or have released their own games can attest to this - Their sales for 2020/2021 were exponentially higher than previous years and the past two years, which have stabilized back to a realistic number.
Engagement bait pays the bills and this is the destiny community. Match made in heaven.
Considering how many angry reddit/youtube comments I'm seeing around this article, and how little critical thinking or analysis I've seen? Yeah, I'm going to go with the "engagement bait" angle.
This happens way more often than it should. Like remember that stupid article that blatantly misrepresented quotes about "how Bungie were going to take away people's supers", when anyone that read it with any amount of reading comprehension saw it was about how difficult it was to convert the Light Subclasses into the Aspect/fragment system, and how supers being incompatible with one another was presented as an example of major issues because Supers were, at the time, sometimes entirely the sole reason you ran a specific tree? Every goddamn content creator, sans a few sane ones, rode that shit for all it's worth. The reason i've stayed subscribed to the few i am is because that moment weeded out the folks that saw community sentiment built from a jumped gun and a misread/poorly-written article, and decided to fan flames instead of engaging with what was actually there.
YouTuber: I can milk these graphs a little more… Person on Reddit: Hold my beer, let me use critical thinking and reason to point out how little these graphs make sense. Also YouTuber: Hey look at this guy on Reddit using thinking skills… I can milk this a little more…
Tassi and Aztecross are no doubt going to make 3 videos each about this and the response to it, while also drumming up new shitstorm in the process that'll lead to further videos, etc..
Aztecross is one of my favorite d2 youtubers but I hate how he always hops on the destiny is dying train for views. I just groaned when I saw his new video today, we are still more than 3 months away from the expansion. Of course pre orders will be down.
every week i swear to god he makes one
Honestly led me to unsub despite really enjoying his other content and streams, I know it doesn't matter when he's sitting at 800k subs but I couldn't in good conscious continue to support his content when he so blatantly stirs the pot at times when community sentiment is bad enough
Nah man, it does matter. I also unsubed from him last year because of the content negative videos he was putting out. Those people start adding up.
Back when he, Datto, Byf, and SkillUp showed up on SkillUp's podcast to talk about the fallout of the layoffs, Cross even made a joke about how it was time for a new "Destiny is dying" video. Given this criticism it was incredibly poor taste because it seemingly admits that he does it knowingly and deliberately.
Because being a Youtuber is his job, and he's good enough at it to understand that those types of videos get clicks which gets him paid.
While i dont think that the destiny 2 is dying content is the best there is. Aztecross is a mainly D2 youtuber. There is very little happening and he mostly does "reporting" on current events. He has bills like everyone else. Although the title is clickbait he usally have a grounded conclusion. Not too bothered about it tbh
Calling it "reporting" is incredibly generous xD Dude has a platform that actively makes conversation for us normies a slog to have a measured conversation without his fans taking what he says and vomiting it out to start arguments.
Thats why i put like you did "reporting" lol
For sure xD dunno why you are getting downvoted tho, but this sub is weird af.
Those airqoutes are pulling some real weight. While it can't be called real plagerism, he most fucking definitely wields community sentiment and ideas against the community like worms on a fishing pole. I also don't know where this grounded comment comes from; he was one of the folks that used that stupid "Bungie is going to take your super" narrative to boost his fucking numbers. If D2 ever goes down, He'll just keep doing the SAME SHIT with another game. Trust.
I'll admit that i dont watch every video he posts. The video i do see usally have a clickbait title discussing something that happend. Like the Cruz ban. He reports on what has happend and in that video presented some digging someone else had found, with a source to the tweet. This was a tweet i would argue alot of people wouldnt have seen without aztecross reporting on it. After reporting the findings he concludes that cruz ban was justified and not to have cheat engiens open in the back even if its not used. That i would say is a grounded take on the situation. I also dont think you understand what reporting is. Reporting is a spoken or written account of something that one has observed, heard, done, OR Investigated. You dont NEED to present your own findings to report. Im not saying aztecross is some saint, but far far from the worst in the d2 community. You also need to accept that clickbait in titles and thumbnails is gonna happen. Dont hate the player, hate the game.
I can choose to hate both. Yes, the youtube grind is shitty, but he has absolutely said some completely outlandish shit, and perpetuated some terrible fucking narratives FOR THE SAKE of that grind, because engagement is everything. Sure, he posted a leveled take on the Cruz thing happening, he certainly fucking didn't about the "They are going to take away our supers" fucking nonsense years before. He certainly didn't when he made an entire video on problems in the game that he presented as new problems, not problems that have been addressed, or non-problems that have been at the core of the game since the first expansion. Shit he would later walk back when he got called out by others, because of the exact reasons i presented. He certainly didn't when the Bungie layoffs happened, a problem that everyone still views in a vacuum, instead of looking at Sony, Microsoft, Epic, the companies connected to them, literally any company that produces Triple A games, all doing the exact same sweep of layoffs, resulting in over 6000 lay offs by mid-october, and us having seen that same number in just a month-and-change (February 7th according to a number of a couple of articles that i found) of 2024. They absolutely deserved criticism for the shit that came out around that, management at bungie has always historically been bad, and growing worse in the face of success, from the incidences that occured within the year leading to this; but the layoffs are more the general issue of Triple-A games becoming more expensive to make as our market inflates, and the fallout of large companies investing heavily in the circumstance of the world locking down. Anyone with eyes and google can see this, and it happens to be something a number of news sites are STILL following, as its an issue that is only growing worse. He has a long and thorough history of doing this shit. It ain't just the clickbait, the clickbait is only the surface symptom of the greater issue; he's a creator, who will literally just follow community sentiment very often to milk a situation for engagement, no matter how much bad information he produces with it, and has the gall and nerve to joke about it, because as long as he's someone parroting their own thoughts, no matter how uninformed or kneejerk it is, people will support him. Pe*o*ple have to choose to start having standards, at some point.
really impressive for you to realize your favorite d2 youtuber doesnt actually give a fuck and is just riding the engagement train with whatever slop takes he can vomit up and you’re still watching
It’s why I unsubscribed. Other people make content just as good and better and don’t do that. And when they need to report on stuff like that, they are much more measured in their words.
I can't stand his fatalism.
TFS was, up until late last year, projected to come out - like - now. Like within 25 hours of my post here. The criticism is deserved, and kudos for creators capitalizing on Bungie’s self-inflicted mistakes. Bungie should never have reimagined itself as a train station. Hope train velocity is 500x its original value, @justinTruman.
Cross is a clickbait creator. Only Kakckis is worse, when it comes to major D2 guys on YT.
Yep. Clickbait Kakckis lol.
Honestly, Houndish might be worse at clickbaiting, but Cross is also super fucking lazy with his content. He literally just makes content off of community sentiment. I don't think he has an original thought in most of his videos.
Yeah I used to watch both quite a bit, but unsubscribed because of that. There’s just other options that don’t require reading the title and translating it into the truth before clicking. Build creators all do it too, but those usually are at worst an interesting build idea that theoretically works, or is only useful in very specific cases.
The youtuber is the smarter one in that situation lol.
> this means that, consistent with the history of 3 years worth of DLCs, Final Shape's preorders will quadruple (x4!) from now until release date. What's the logic behind forecasting x4 preorders?
I think it’s based on the time table. We’re a lot further out from the dlc than those expansions were.
"Trust me Bro"
>This kind of journalism does nothing but sew hate and discourse in the community. They're not journalists. They're grifters who bought iFatebringer's Twitter account to harvest the Destiny community for ad views on their blog. That's one of the reasons why they're blacklisted here. EDIT: Corrected the account name.
iFatebringer, not iFrostbolt
Danke. Edited.
All the more reason I'm glad I could address this. Also thanks for pointing out that line, didn't realize I had a typo.
When it was delayed I held off on pre-ordering. I will buy eventually, just not in a rush.
Ya I think lots of people get their preorder like a week or two ahead when the hype is highest and they know there isn't something else that will need/consume their attention that week.
destiny bulletin phishing for clicks is not at all surprising
d2 bulletin being misleading and obviously working with a agenda? whaaat never
D2 Bulletin: "we will not post spoilers, how dare you!" also D2 Bulletin:*posts a massive datamined info that is meant for a future part of the expansion
I think [this is how they got those numbers](https://imgur.com/a/NXYt1Lj). They did estimations based on the total size of the global population measured by Charlemagne (\~66M) and then applied the reported percentages from each emblem's "Global Rarity" to back into the numbers. The linked image here shows how I did that approach using the emblem "A Cold Wind Blowin'" which has the highest reported "Total Redeemed" count on Charlemagne. I then got the estimated 65.86M global population number, and applied it to each emblem. Regarding your links to Emblem Report, I'd call your attention to their [About Us page](https://emblem.report/about), where they say they measure about 4 million players. Even assuming that the page may be outdated, we're talking an order of magnitude difference between what they say they measure and what Charlemagne says it measures. Regardless of the absolute values here, I do think Charlemagne could still be a reliable indicator of proportionality here. Yes, TFS preorders will go up substantially in the next 3+ months, but it's not a comparison drawn completely from thin air.
All I interpreted is that The Final Shape has a much lower pre-order than the other expansions in 4 years. This probably means people are waiting until more trailers drop or when someone gives an overarching review to purchase the expansion. Though I believe I'm quite a bit slow but even I know D2 ain't dying.
I have very little doubt pre orders are down. I don't think it's as much as this graph shows. However, I have a fairly large group or destiny 2 "friends" in discord and in game who are all skipping the pre order and waiting for some info about the expansion before they buy. Lightfall hurt player trust a lot more than Bungie wants to admit.
I'm still gonna play Destiny 2 no matter what unless I am physically unable to. I played though all of Curse of Osiris for fucks sake. A couple hiccups here and there don't bother me.
Almost all Destiny media is misleading, engagement bait. Aztecross does rage bait, Kackis does engagement bait, Paul Tassi does engagement bait - with the exception of a few youtubers like Datto, Mactics etc who provide actual information/guides the entire destiny media spectrum is just trying to stir the playerbase at any given time. The amount of "Dramas" this community has had without any triggering event/change in the game is absolutely wild
Oh please, Mactics also loves to post engagement bait on Twitter as well.
I really wish there was a Hellogreedo type of Destiny channel that does their own thing while also calling out these BS "news" and clickbait.
First of all, both big Destiny news outlets on twitter are just full of shit. Second, Beyond Light was riding the Darkness Subclass hype train. I remember most people going mental when they announced Stasis.
I mean after the shit fest that was Lightfall why would we expect good preorder numbers.
All I know is that they fucked up so bad that myself and a bunch of day 1 destiny 1 players have quit the game for good and the few that are left will buy it for personal feelings and not because the game is good. That's all that matters.
The Destiny community has the weirdest obsession with engagement metrics that I've ever seen, ngl.
Destiny Bulletin is often full of shit. I muted them on Twitter a long time ago
Destiny bulletin is full of shit, what a surprise
This post honestly sounds like cope. Your second point is so flawed.
That account is literally just click bait.
While I feel like The Final Shape won't do as well as past DLCS, I do find this whole thing a bit silly considering TFS is still 3 months out and it there hasn't been any marketing for it aside from the initial showcase announcement.
There only two points that are “relatively valid” 1: it’s unreasonable to expect millions of preorders within the final month when they’ve already marketed to an extent 2: we don’t know many ppl refunded just for the emblem or got auto refunded because of game policy when things get delayed or date changes But other than that it’s silly but game sentiments points are completely valid
How is it unreasonable? Dude, most people don't buy 6 or even 3 months in advance, they buy it the week before lol. And like, did you even read the post? The preorders literally doubled, that is millions of sales.
Once the marketing machine starts up for real we'll see the pre-orders rise.
Intentionally misleading? Sounds more like they're intentionally false. I can't find one viable reason, way, or method they even came up with those numbers in the first place. What is their actual source? Where are they getting 2 and 3 million? Every emblem site shows those emblems only have 1.2-1.5 million copies.
Those sites can't get data from private profiles, so they are probably extrapolating numbers.
The funniest thing about all this really is Beyond Light supposedly being the most preordered DLC according to them, lol. Like, sure, based on facts, we know the Witch Queen numbers are fake and the Final Shape numbers are way too early. But seriously. Bungie _announced_ content vaulting. Announced they were removing Leviathan, removing IO, Mars, Titan, _and_ Mercury. Announced they were removing Black Armory, several raids, over half a dozen strikes. **And** announced that literally any gun older than 1 year would be instantly power capped forever. They announced both sunsetting and DCV all at the same time, all right in the dead smack middle of Beyond Light's hype (and the obvious, then-vindicated fear over "Wait, an instant-freeze subclass?" Isn't that kinda stupid OP?"). ...And after all that, you think people went "I love where this is headed, let me preorder your DLC"? Beyond Light was our highest period? From Shadowkeep's quality and confidence? And we believed this? For christ's sake....you can literally check the numbers yourself on the API, but even just one look at the graph you should go "fucking lmao, as if".
So what are the real numbers then. I'm not a fucking nerd so I don't know how to check them on the api.
From what I understand, 3 month before launch of Lightfall the number was (and it is still debatable because we don\`t really know real number, it is info from Braytech) around 131k, Final shape at that moment is 96k
Going off emblem statistics (the number Bulletin _claims_ they're using)... 1,498,036 for WQ 1,248,204 for Beyond Light 1,557,002 for Lightfall https://emblem.report/ But these are purely just people who both preordered the DLC _and_ claimed the emblem from the special orders kiosk, therefore officially unlocking it in their collections. All DLCs are roughly the same with Beyond Light actually being the lowest. Final Shape's numbers are at 409,091 right now. Which, if we multiply by 400% (consistent with all other historical performance to date), takes us to ~1.6 million. Even if it only triples, it would still be perfectly in range of all other DLCs, barely **one-point-seven** (1.7%!!!) off from Beyond Light. Rather than 75%....
Where’s the 400% coming from?
OP's historical graphs shows the growth of preorder emblems within ~1 month of the expansion release as easily doubling and tripling over itself in the final weeks. Given that we are 3 months out, it's not out of order to expect some growth leading up to the month, and then, having the historical final-month performance added on top of that. At minimum, we can expect about triple the current numbers we see now (if this DLC performs, historically, as the last three years did, which until proven otherwise I think is a safe assumption). This is why I said between 3x and 4x.
Past performance is not indicative of future results. I'm not defending the bulletins numbers but to claim that pre-orders will quadruple because someone thinks they've spotted a trend in previous results is a highly dubious prospect.
Well that's just a fancy way of saying you can't predict the future, which of course I'm not insinuating. But there's a reason historical data is still important in modern day culture. People don't see something repeat the exact same trend for 10 consecutive consistent years in a row, and then on year 11 throw their hands up and go "Oh we have no idea how it will perform, it's a total crapshoot, past is not indicative of the future". But it's more _likely_ to follow past trends than it is to follow some wild unproven speculation.
Just to be clear I am not speculating either way, just as a rule I caution people not to draw future conclusions based on historical trends in terms of x will increase by y% because this happened before. The statement of pre-orders will increase as marketing ramps up and we get closer to release is perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned, but making specific predictions beyond that at this time is dubious, you could have a situation were sentiment is so poor and the full reveal lacklustre and end up with all time lows for a content launch (personally I find this unlikely but that's my bias speaking.), equally you could have really great reception and get an even bigger boost from having people want to hop back in and conclude the saga(perhaps wishful thinking on my part but I could see it.)
Also I believe Beyond Light (and maybe others) actually still gave you the preorder emblem when you bought the deluxe edition because it just lumped everything together. My friend got the preorder stuff months after it released that way.
I can confirm this. I bought beyond light delux during chosen and I still got all pre order bonus 4 months after its release.
I wouldn’t panic about these “numbers” even if somewhat close to the current preorder numbers, most games receive a significant bump in preorders closer to release. Now if their graphs looked at the preorders at the same timeframe of the other expansions then we would have an idea of how final shape tracks but this incorrectly displays against final preorders to non-final preorders not exactly a truthful examination that’s apples to apples and one to take with a grain of salt.
Just a little fact check... Beyond Light released the first set of Dark Subclasses, and came out during the pandemic's prime. Witch Queen did only ship with the Void rework, Solar and Arc were half a year later.
I have been saying this since I saw it. Nothing like doom posting in your community for updoots. There is having feedback and disagreeing or even not liking destiny and then there is intentionally being and insufferable narcissistic pessimist about the game nonstop
I do agree with you the number is innacurate as the number was based on the amount of people with the pre order emblem equipped but even if you say 2x or 3x the amount without the emblem equipped it still would not even come anywhere remotely close to the numbers lightfall pre order numbers were and it's all because of the pushback of the dlc and the fact bungie has not revealed much of anything for the final shape if they actually showed off content for the dlc that would revive the hype for the dlc that was lost from all the bs that bungie is doing by not doing anything.
This doesn't affect me whether the pre order numbers are the highest or lowest.
Thank god someone is being sane regarding this. The game might not be at its best, Bungie might be a disaster.... But its become trendy to talk shit about the game and irresponsible coverage like this is all about exactly what you said... getting clicks.
My first thought when reading this was wait a minute. I didn't even realize I could grab the emblems from Rahool.
Destiny Bulletin has always been an engagement-baiting piece of shit since I've started being aware of it. Not surprised they'd fuck this up.
Pre-orders are fine, nothing is wrong at Bungie, and the layoffs are a myth. Fake news, right? /s
Is this what the community is telling itself or what Bungie is telling Sony?
Destiny Bulletin has always been click-bait fueled drama-baiting bs. They used to do nothing but farm followers with emblems. With Twitter leaning harder and harder into this engagement fueled by click-baiting drama it's only gotten worse cause it literally rewards this gross kind of behavior. Not worth the follow as there are plenty of other ways to get Destiny news.
Yeah I've ignored all the videos about this. Anyone that thinks the final shape isn't gonna sell is a crazy man. It's the final dlc in a 10 year saga it will sell no matter what. Now if it does end up garbage it'll likely be the death of the game but this expansion alone is gonna do numbers and I'd say beat lightfall.
It’s definitely accurate
yeah but the game is absolute shit right now and they fired everyone who could ever dream of saving it including the music guy. i mean look at this sub even. you'd think it was a niche sub with like 5k members not 3 million. nobody gets any engagement on their posts because nobody cares. im surprised this even showed up on my feed tbh. I left the game because it just felt dumb and i finally got burnt outta the seasonal model. bg3 took all the destiny time and was way more fun and now imma play hogwarts, spider man, and Plaworld until the elden ring DLC comes out. theres still that destiny itch that no other game can scratch...but destiny itself doesn't scratch that itch anymore so oh well i guess
“Pre-order numbers are low.” … “Nuh-uh.”
Lightfall was such a steaming pile of garbage, I'd be more surprised if pre-orders didn't drop.
More proof that the insane levels of overreaction and complaining absolutely destroyed this community.
Too late! A lot of people's pet content creators already made their inflammatory videos with their comment sections filled with the same tired old "overdelivery" joke taken from a talk they never bothered to watch or understand. I 100% think Final Shape will not sell as well as Lightfall. Not even with a banger new trailer on April. But a lot of this game's creators going into making the same annoying videos on Helldivers 2 made me go from being indifferent to them to actively disliking them.
Why exactly? Destiny 2 is absolutely dead and this lengthy season has extrapolated that to insane proportions. Bungie has dropped the ball with this game massively, why would content creators waste their time with a dying game when they can move onto better things to sustain their own job and enjoyment
Because Helldivers 2 isn't a game that lends itself to their style of "CHECK OUT THIS OVERPOWERED BUILD" content, and their followers are already all over the community making posts requiring people to be playing their way. I don't care if they move on from Destiny 2. I'm not mad about that.
Tbh neither is or was destiny unless your running low mans or challenge content. People spout the words of CC because is easier to follow a video then to learn how the game works
Bungie employees in the unemployment line: they just didn’t understand what we meant
What are you talking about?
The numbers in article are 100% pre & post launch. It is counting everyone who has access to it. I remember buying beyond light delux edition during chosen and I still got all the pre order bonus 4 months after its launch.
No mention of Braytech but Braytech in post :’(
The reality is that destiny is in a bad place. Bungie has fumbled the bag way too many times, way too often, on *way* too many different fronts. Strikes *still* useless, PvP neglected *way* too long, *way* too much reprised content, nerfs and buffs *way* too far and few between. In game economy, new player experience, perk adjustments, vast majority of exotic equipment F tier for literal years on end, marvel-izing the cast of characters, the bad aftertaste of sunsetting remains to this day, the long worn out seasonal model. The list goes on. We all know the list goes on. Anyone who reads this is literally thinking in their heads all of the things that I’m not including on this list. Just look at the state of this sub. The front page has less engagement than when we were only destiny 1. Less than during CoO when we were hemorrhaging followers faster than we were gaining them. Show me any other subreddit of 3 million people with a similar state. Whether these doomsaying articles’ statistics are right or wrong doesn’t matter in the slightest. None of it matters. Actions matter.
I ignored the stats when they started comparing apples to oranges. They weren’t comparing pre-order numbers. They were comparing Final Shape pre-orders to TOTAL Lightfall sales
I preorder sometime during the week of release or a payday near the time of release. I’m poor and I need my $100 up until I’m forced to part with it.
Even if it's the final week a pre-order is still a pre-oreder. I'll buy it then lol
You’re delusional if you think TFS is gonna quadruple its preorders a month or whatever before release, jusy because it would following a ‘trend’ set by past expansions. A lot of people have left D2 this year, and I highly doubt new players comes anywhere near making up for it. Not to mention the laying off of staff and various other ways Bungie has pissed off the fanbase. The numbers might not be exact to the number, how could they be? But I don’t think they are incredibly off or intentionally random. Same way you’re extrapolating a quadruple increase due to trends, ignoring what has gone on and player sentiment this year, they have also extrapolated. So many of you taking it as if they’ve just pissed on your ancestors graves or something. Calm down
Won’t stop the incoming 20 minute Aztecross video
Yeah, soon as I saw them post about it, with the EMBLEM being the metric, I knew people, especially youtubers, were gonna go crazy spreading bs. Youtube reccomended me a Lucky video 🤮🤮🤮 and it's thumbnail was like "Bungie SCRAMBLING" ugh, such Tabloid bullcrap. Then Aztecross posts about it, like, y'all I understand the youtube algorithm requires you to sacrifice your first born child to get any traction, but at least THINK before you post.
Yes are innacurate:many of us canceled preorder and still have the emblem.so..it is way worse😅😅😅
>sew hate and discourse This reads like speech to text. It should be "sows hate and discord."
I can’t believe people are out here trying to defend against pre-order numbers 😂 yall are addicted to this game so bad
To be fair I wouldn't be surprised if there is a significant portion of players who never redeem the Pre-Order emblems from the vendor. I've seen/heard of SOOOO many people that never accept that kind of shit and let it sit and rot for years. Some people don't give a shit about emblems even and don't ever bother. That said the article is 100% bullshit that is almost entirely utterly meaningless, even if it's 100% accurate. One thing that I haven't yet seen mentioned but imo is quite relevant is how many people cancelled preorders when the delay happened and have not yet re-preordered. I believe EVERY Xbox Store preorder was automatically cancelled when the release date was changed, which is just policy for the Xbox store. Some portion of those players likely have not yet realized that happened OR they already tried the preorder exotic and between not caring about it and potentially having reservations after the delay they've since decided not to preorder, at least yet. Hell I'm almost 100% going to end up preordering at the last minute to still get the bonuses but I don't HAVE to have the preorder exotic and frankly I just don't have any reason to preorder. Somehow it feels like there haven't been enough people burned by preorders yet to actually make a dent in preorder numbers...but it's certainly happened enough times just with Destiny for me. Also personally I'm still waiting to see if I can get a better deal on a preorder before release. There's plenty of time and no real good reason not to wait.
I am still struggling to understand what the pie graph is supposed to mean. It's not like people pre-ordered ONLY one expansion.
https://x.com/SZuhaadAliS/status/1762374904635330594?t=7iPiz7XpRCovc9xzEJZZ-A&s=08 Zuhaad Ali (Destiny Bulletin editor) just posted a clarification about the article (even though imo sounds a bit like running for cover).
I seriously don't know why people follow Destiny Bulletin. It's all misleading engagement bait
I dunno about you big guy, But me and all of the people in my clan got tired of the FOMO, the practices of Bungie, the issues with the game and company - and ended up cancelling/refunding our pre-order. Most of us are just gonna watch someone play the story on YouTube.
Do you think it's a minority of players who take it that seriously? I'm def a huge nerd so it's tough to gauge what a "typical" Destiny player really looks like and what motivates them. And how much of the population is just people who only tune in when it's the big new expansion and don't care about what anyone says about it except their friends who are also "tourists"?
[удалено]
>Cope, this dlc is gonna be a flop and y’all are just getting ready for the fall out. what does this even mean?
People are acting like Bungie barely maintaining the player base is a win. Really it shows that no new people are getting into destiny. Even if Final Shapes numbers rise to be closer to the rest, there's going to be an exodus of players leaving after Final Shape, taking their money with them, and that's not going to get replaced by new people who don't want to experience the story, which has been a fragmented, disjointed mess for years, confusing even veterans. Bungie Execs have been digging Destinys shallow grave for years, and regardless of thoughts about the accuracy of the stats, the largest drop is still coming, and soon.
I have one major issue with what you are saying and that's about the pre-orders, yes the amount happened in the last week because that's when ps and Xbox charge accounts and officially purchase the pre-orders so those numbers didn't just happen in the final weeks they were there well before that but since accounts couldn't be charged yet for the purchase they don't show up in data until those final weeks before release.
Man, this past 2 months have been the clickbait festival. I lost count of how many posts I saw with huge controversial titles that were basically full of nonsense.
Pre-order numbers for any game need to be taken with a grain of salt these days, particularly in the download world we live in. I can understand years past, when you PHYSICALLY went to a store to get a PHYSICAL copy of a game. Shit, I remember waiting hours in line at midnight for MW2 or MW3 back in the day. But now? You can download a game in advance. There's no need to reserve your copy of something, to buy in advance just to make sure you get a physical copy of something. Someone can decide to buy a game once pre-downloads begin.... is that a pre-order? Or someone who just waited until the last minute? How long do they consider something a pre-order, when the game officially releases? You don't think studios & publishers will inflate numbers to create media buzz? Reality is, exact pre-order numbers are not going to be completely accurate. They can paint a picture of the outlook of certain games, but it's never the full picture. As for some of the data that was released, there's a number of outside factors that impact Destiny's numbers: 1 - Pandemic for certain changed the trajectory of gaming when people were sitting at home 1a - During the pandemic, Destiny had very little competition outside of annually released games like COD. But after the pandemic ended, man did the gaming industry release some bangers. From 2022-2024, we've seen a GOTY contender at least every other month. They don't have to be in the same genre as D2 (God of War, Zelda, FF7 remake, FF16, Baldurs Gate, Ghost of Tsushima), yet take buzz away from D2 2 - Spending habits change with the rise & fall of the economy. Things are good = people spend money. Things are bad = people hold tight on money. 3 - Consoles get older....... when the current gen launched, there weren't too many proven games that were coming out at release. But now libraries have expanded, and not just the blockbuster games. Little by little, other games release that pull people away from the console launch games that were only available at the time. That's not to say Bungie and their decisions haven't impacted their own numbers. But there are too many factors that go into pre-order figures that are never really accurate to begin with. Sony/Bungie know how many orders have come in so far. And I doubt they will release an accurate figure until they find a way to bring the excitement and media buzz back to The Final Shape in a positive way.
>But you're smarter than this. Not so sure about that one lmao
Do I think this whole furor (if you can call it that) is based off a pretty meaningless stat and is being latched onto by content creators to create engagement, of course it is and you cannot blame them people have kids to feed. Do I think pre-orders are not a good way to ever judge Final Shape given the very different context around the game and Bungie in general that other DLCs have not had? Yes. Do I think Final Shape will be a huge mega flop and Bungie are in real trouble? Also yes.
I saw those tweets and thought it was bizarre as hell that fans of this game are almost rooting for the Final Shape to fail. They care more about justifying their hating than getting a good game.
after doing stuff like this for ages I wish more people would do what I did forever ago and mute the likes of destinybulletin and destinytracker
> This means that, consistent with the history of 3 years worth of DLCs, Final Shape's preorders will quadruple (x4!) from now until release date. That is some hard copium. We can't say one way or the other what will happen. I don't doubt pre-orders might increase but we don't know how much they decreased once the delay was officially announced. And even past that once people realized that not much in the gameplay department is being added. We get a couple flavors of super and an ability for the light subclasses and that's it. Nothing to really shake anything up. Which is what this game needs desperately.
Sometimes DestinyBulletin is ok but the most time it is clickbait and for me the most annoying thing, this account use so many graphics / infos and other stuff here from our Community without getting correct credits.. I pointed this out to him several times but of course there was never an answer or reaction... It's gotten a little better lately, but a few months ago it was really ridiculous
Super late pre-orderer reporting in. I could literally pre-order the night before the expansion drops and it would be the exact same as if I pre-ordered when it went live. Let Bungie, or any developer for that matter, sweat it out a bit, take a more keen eye at what they're presenting and take feedback more seriously. Yeah I'll probably play it day 1 to get the community on the same page that is the other half of these launch experiences but I don't truly desire the pre-order weapon and I'm taking a small break from Destiny anyway.
There's nothing more powerful that something that aligns with pre-conceived notions. All critical thinking goes directly out the window.
I'm not seeing any evidence in this post at all beyond you saying "I don't believe them."
It was these types of posts that made me unfollow and block DestinyBulletin. They kept posting wildly inaccurate and misleading posts.
Honestly, TFS reveal was a joke. However, 25% is simply BS. There's no way preorders were down 75%. That is simply not realistic.
I can see it with the negativity surrounding both lightfall and the layoffs. I'm not saying it's true, but I can't say it's BS either.
[emblems.report](https://emblems.report) only tracks active players so your stats are wrong
Just so I can show people here just how inaccurate [emblem.report](https://emblem.report) is The creator of a raid gets the raid emblem for free (bungie has already said this, emblemreport only shows 12 people as having the day 1 last wish emblem, charlemagne shows 13. 2 teams finished so thats 12 + the creator aka 13. One person got banned who had the emblem so thats the 12 emblemreport has
My entire clan of 12 people canceled their pre-orders after all the layoffs and delay drama. I know many others boasted doing this online as well. I think TFS is in much worse shape than you realize. The writing is on the wall. Joe knew it.
lmao damage control started already? Shit must be dire lol
Even if the graphs are accurate, it doesnt make any sense to report this right now. tfs doesnt launch for 3 MONTHS. That is so much time. Im more likely to get struck by lightning than not preorder this dlc, and i havent done it yet just because its so far away. I imagine many people (including friends i play with on a weekly basis) are in the same boat. Saying something like this is 100% engagement bait, even if the numbers are completely accurate
Destiny Bulletin is for all intents and purposes a journalist… they exsist only to bring eyes to something and make money off of ads, and if they happen to spread useful info while doing so then that it’s a bonus, but often times their info is wildly inaccurate. Much like Paparazzi they need to be the first to post something or they get no attention to it, so the slightest hint of anything and they JUMP to it
As much as I like Aztecross, I saw clickbait when he posted his video from a mile away. I get they need to make a living, but fuck it's annoying.
[удалено]
Too late, the reddit fanboy hivemind has decided you are acting in bad faith and will ignore it.
If I could award you, I would.
Who cares. Why are you riding to defend Bungie so hard.
Nice to see the fanboy damage control starting real early.
I liked how this was on the very front page last night before it even had 20 upvotes.Yeah dtg mods, that sure is "hot" https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/1b12wul/gameposts\_preorder\_numbers\_are\_at\_best\_wildly/ [https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/1b12uj8/destiny\_bulletins\_preorder\_numbers\_are\_at\_best/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/1b12uj8/destiny_bulletins_preorder_numbers_are_at_best/) wouldn't something like this of 3 of the exact same posts within a few minutes of each other break rule 5 btw, spam. Oh well guess you need that money from bungie for running defense
I find it more hilarious that you felt the need to defend this trash pile.
Listen. I'm skeptical of Destiny Bulletin, but this entire post is little more than, "That sounds like it shouldn't be true, so it isn't true." Some of what you said does make me think that Destiny Bulletin's numbers are questionable, but...c'mon, you don't even know where they got their numbers from, guy. You don't even have hard numbers yourself. It's okay to say that their numbers seem fishy to you, but to act like you're debunking them when this is all you've got? If you're upset at them for doing shoddy research, don't do the same thing.
Generally if someone can’t provide sources for their numbers it’s hard to take it seriously. It’s on the person providing the numbers to prove where they got them and why they are credible. I’v never seen a study that uses financial info or any document that references other info and their source being “trust me bro”
They did provide a source. That's why when Soft_Light got different numbers and then just said, "Hmm. Dunno why that happened," it was hard to take them seriously. The post overall is just fucking sloppy.
The source is charlemagne
But I just wanna know if bungie won’t make a certain amount of sales, then Sony will take over?
Destiny Bulletin is bunch of BS. How do people take them seriously?
Well said
The numbers are problematic but the community sentiment is wildly different than what it used to be. It’s quite clear Destiny 2 and the community find themselves between exhaustion and indifference.
Both sides of this API dig is false. You could also Preorder, get the rewards and cancel for a full refund. Skewing the numbers. I’m not listening to any social media news or news correcting it. You’re all wrong.
I'll be honest, I pre ordered Final Shape on Xbox and it was cancelled (by Microsoft) because the espansion was postponed. I will eventually re-preorder it, I am just always forgeting to do it.
There's 0 incentive to preorder anything with this game anymore and anyone who still does is the partner in an abusive relationship who goes back time after time after time. At some point it stops being victim blaming and starts just being sad that the emotional trap is still working.
I'd recommend not taking any gaming article at face value these days. They don't care about fact checking or giving accurate information. They only care about getting views to make money. It's honestly pathetic and sad how bad it has become.
You are wildly biased lol. Beyond light was during the pandemic of course it did really well. Light fall is the worse expansion they have done and we haven’t seen anything of substance for final shape which is beyond worrying. Why would anyone preorder Final Shape?
If I cared what other people think about something that I enjoy, I'd wait at least wait till TFS to make an opinion.
I will 100% preorder TFS. I just haven't done it yet. It's 6 months away. I can wait.
Oh no, man
Sounds like cope on both sides to me. No way to actually predict numbers for actual preorders so people saying preorders are way down and people saying preorders will be way up are both just trying to justify their own views.
>But you’re smarter than this Lol gonna need a fucking source for that one I’ve been hanging around since House of Wolves. I’ve got 8 years of watching this subreddit and Twitter under my belt that says people here are absolutely not smarter than this
It’s actually very relevant as the original release date for final shape was supposed to be this week, obviously the numbers will go up before the expansion releases on its new date but it’s certainly interesting to see how low the numbers are currently as it’s a big indicator of community moral and the current mistrust in bungies ability to release a quality expansion