Even Destiny 2’s demise won’t save Rising

In May, Bungie announced that Destiny 2’s next update would be its last infusion of new content. The update would come with several new modes and a revamp of some of the content the team had spent the last decade building. On June 9, that patch finally came, and saw Destiny 2 enter its end of service phase. Later last month, Sony laid off nearly the entire Destiny 2 team.

With the original gone, Destiny: Rising, the mobile title from NetEase that launched last year, has been the only Destiny game in town for a little over a month now. It’s not really clear how many players have potentially jumped to mobile (or, more likely, are emulating Rising on their computer) to get their Destiny fix, but one thing is clear: Destiny 2’s death has not solved Rising’s money problems.

We’ve written before about Rising’s difficulty actually making money. The game essentially took a nosedive just a month after release, with spending dropping from over $6m to under $3m from September to October last year.

The same AppMagic estimates now suggest Destiny: Rising has been pulling in arounf $300k per month since March this year. While the game does use an external web page when making purchases (at least on Android, as iOS differs from Apple Pay) it’s done that since launch, so it’s unlikely that the issue here is the data tracking.

All of this to say: Rising is very obviously struggling to pull Destiny 2 players to the game, even when they have no Destiny 2 to invest in.

As both a Destiny 2 and Rising player, the reason for this is fairly obvious. While Rising may exist in the Destiny universe (albeit another timeline), and does an admirable job mimicking the franchise’s unique feel, there is just no substitute for the real thing. One of the great tragedies for the Destiny community is that truly nothing else out there is like Destiny 2, despite games like Anthem and Outriders giving it an honest shot over the years. Rising is a fun game to fill in gaps between Destiny 2 releases, but it’s just too much of a gacha game and not enough of a Destiny game.

But that’s not the only frustration with Rising. One Destiny 2 player recently lamented that Rising’s financial failure actually makes the franchise look worse. Even commenters who initially enjoyed the game and found it “fresh” compared to Destiny 2, have dropped it because of that gacha influence. Rising enjoyers giving advice to Destiny 2 players suggest they don’t spend money on NetEase’s title, saying it’s fun enough as a free-to-play game.

As for what’s next for Rising, things aren’t particularly encouraging there either. Season 5 just came out, and players are saying there is “no new content,” which is essentially true. Almost everything outside of a new system addition and a more powerful version of the game’s main character is rehashed from a previous season. There isn’t even a flashy new character to draw for — the main reason players spend money on the game.

There is little to no information about what could potentially come in future seasons for the game either, outside of a vague trailer from last year suggesting Destiny 2’s main villain will come to Rising sooner than expected.

It’s unclear if Destiny: Rising is just seeing a dip in new content before a larger update coming this year or if the game has entered a new kind of death spiral — although the spending data certainly suggests one of those over the other. But one thing is extremely clear in 2026: it’s a hard time to be a Destiny fan.