Bungie has released some end of the year statistics for its blockbuster shooter, Destiny, and the impressive numbers reflect a strong start for the studio and Activision’s highly hyped franchise. As of December 19, almost 13 million players have created over 22 million Guardians, spending over 870 million hours shooting aliens in the head and hunting for fancy guns.
For scale, if all of the Guardians lived in a single city, it would be as large as New York and Los Angeles combined. In the total time played, the Curiosity Rover could have made its trek to Mars over 100,000 times. Those numbers have only gone up by the time you read this, and will likely spike again when the week after Christmas brings many more players into the fold. Bungie implores established players to go easy on these “Christmas Noobs” and take them under your wing as future allies.
Eurogamer crunched the numbers comparing Destiny‘s statistics to some of gaming’s heavy hitters. Although Destiny has a ways to go before it can approach League of Legends‘ 67 million monthly players, Riot Games’ multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) is free-to-play with microtransaction support, and is already established as one of the most played games in the world with a robust tournament scene, so the comparison is not entirely fair. The venerable World of Warcraft‘s 10 million-plus monthly subscribers is a more apt and favorable comparison for the young game.
Digital Trends’ Adam Rosenberg is personally responsible for more than his fair share of those millions of hours, working tirelessly to bring you extensive gameplay guides and informed, insider insights into the game’s future.
Following the recently released The Dark Below, the next major expansion, House of Wolves, is scheduled to arrive in 2015, though no date has yet been given. Though only a few months old, Destiny has loomed large in our coverage this year, and we look forward to following it further in 2015.
