4.6 Million Players Joined In The Destiny Beta

The last few years have seen a number of major game releases marred by issues with server capacity, as millions of players try to get online all at the same time, exposing the inadequacies of the infrastructure in place for launch. Many a server has been brought to its knees under the strain, collapsing in floods of electronic tears.

Coming off the back of a successful beta, it’s looking good for Bungie’s upcoming epic to see a relatively smooth and pain free launch. Aside from early hiccups as keys were distributed upon the beta’s launch on 17th July, where it was difficult to gain access for a few hours, the beta was actually pretty much problem free. Even at the presumed heights of capacity last Saturday night, when Bungie opened up the Moon for co-op play and beta access was possible for anyone across four console platforms, the servers bore the weight of all the players.

Activision have today announced that 4,638,937 unique players took part over the course of the beta, with CEO of Activision Publishing saying, “This is the biggest beta of this console generation by a wide margin and the largest console beta ever for a new video game IP to date.” Admittedly it’s difficult to figure out which console generation he’s talking about, but regardless, COO of Bungie, Pete Parsons added, “We were totally blown away by the number of people who played the beta. We surpassed even our own goals and the feedback was invaluable. ”

While we don’t know the peak number of players, everything’s pointing to the game’s launch on 9th September going off without any major problems, especially as the release will be staggered across multiple time zones.

Unless I’ve just given it the commentator’s curse…

Source: press release

5 Comments

  1. Source on the staggered time zone release?

    Trying to work out if there is any point in taking the Tuesday off as well as Weds-Fri :P

    Not much point if servers go live at the times they did for the alpha/beta.

    • As in midnight in the UK is 5 hours ahead of midnight in New York. So no source just, you know… time zones.

      • Gotcha. So midnight PDT (where all the beta times were calculated from) is 8am BST.

        So no point in going to a midnight release. May as well work the Tuesday then.

        Thanks :)

  2. They don’t mention how many were playing on Saturday night, when we could go to the moon? Which was presumably somewhere between “some” and “4,638,936”. Less than the 4,638,937 who played over the whole beta anyway.

    Since that managed to break the servers, it’s going to be a mess when the final version releases, isn’t it? And it’ll probably take the PSN down with it.

    What to do? Pre-order it and risk it getting really annoying on release day? Or get it delivered for free from Amazon sometime after. And risk them putting the price up.

  3. Looking forward to this in September, Ltd Edition on order.

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