Destiny: Rising has been out for three months and has earned NetEase and Bungie about $12m to date, according to Appmagic estimates.
It is nominated for Best Mobile Game at the Game Awards, and Destiny 2’s biggest bad will also be coming come to Rising much sooner than anticipated. NetEase has also revealed a promising roadmap for the next four months.
All of this comes after a decent launch – according to Appmagic estimates, Destiny: Rising has been downloaded 4.4m times since its near-global launch on August 28, and has made $11.97m in IAP to date. Daily earnings peaked at $319k on September 5.
One might think these numbers – and that awards nod – suggest the game’s doing fine. But the story inside the Destiny: Rising community is far more bleak, and daily earnings have already plummeted – now at about $25k a day, says Appmagic – since that September peak. And worse, the game’s second season has flopped.
At launch, Rising had very positive word of mouth – a genuine shock for those who assumed it would suffer through a launch like NetEase’s Diablo Immortal. It also benefited greatly from Destiny 2’s struggles – after finishing its 10 year story saga last year with The Final Shape, Bungie overhauled many of the game’s core systems with the Edge of Fate expansion this past July. The expansion was not well received, leaving the playerbase eager for a game to grind. Enter Destiny: Rising.
Destiny 2 has steadily improved over the fall, however, and Rising has not done much to impress players in its second season, which launched in early November.
Outside of some minor additions with that second season, Rising players have been grinding the same content since the end of August, and there’s been no meaningful progression in the story, no new destinations to explore, and no true successor to the game’s first raid.
While it seems a little early to complain about a lack of content, Rising asks players to log in daily and play the same things over and over again. It gets stale quickly without regular content injections, and players are already complaining about struggling to matchmake with others.
The game may also be too forgiving from a spending perspective. The difference in power between spenders and free-to-play enjoyers isn’t particularly wide, and there isn’t a lot of value for spending money to pull for character duplicates when NetEase disables those benefits for certain endgame activities.
That’s great news for free players, but the incentive to spend to keep up – a staple in the genre – is low.
And then there’s the Chinese market, where the game is known as Destiny: Stars. While Rising released near-globally in August, Stars only entered into an ‘open beta’ state in China last month and was greeted with a mediocre user score, which doesn’t bode particularly well. And the Appmagic numbers so far look low, though the data we have access to may not be capturing the Chinese market accurately.
If NetEase can make a success of Destiny: Stars in China, then great. The game may have a bright future after all, and the first big content update for Rising in March could help turn things around. But right now that update feels a long way away, and the game’s numbers are in freefall.
Destiny: Rising may well be crowned 2025’s best mobile game at The Game Awards next week – but it’s hard not to wonder if it’ll be around long enough to be nominated for the ‘best ongoing game’ in 2026.
