My friends convinced me to play Destiny 2 a couple years back. It was pretty fun and I was definitely enjoying myself for a couple days. But that's when I found out they vaulted all the previous content from when the game came out. Felt like I was starting the game halfway through the story with no concrete starting point so I lost all motivation to play it again. I didn't pick up the game so I could read up on the story line and watch youtube videos just to understand what's going on. You'll never get that many new players if the first thing you have to do before you play is do homework.

Part of the issue, Green thinks, is that Destiny 2's expansion The Final Shape, which essentially wrapped up the main story Bungie had been working on nigh on a decade. They found that those that played it felt satisfied, but "the big [downwards] spike in population [came after]. That happened because we ended the saga. So you get what you pay for, right?"

I played a lot when 2 released on Steam and even completed the first few raids. Years later, my partner and I were casual players for a few months up to this expansion’s release. It came out, the menus shifted around, then it was… just over.

We played the free stuff but didn’t buy the dlc since we mostly did PvP and didn’t want to spend all our time playing a live service game. Apparently a raid happened and some epic story shit went on, but we never saw any of it and dropped the game soon after. It was a very whelming completion of a 10 year arc.