About John Bedford John is Metabomb's Editor in Chief, and is responsible for all of the Hearthstone news, features and guides content on the site.

Details of how many people are playing Destiny 2, using the latest stats from the leading game trackers.

One of the questions we see pop up regularly focuses on the number of people who are currently playing Destiny 2. For a game that was supposed to build significantly on the success of its predecessor, it's safe to say that it's been a bumpy road since the game launched around five months ago.

Systems have been found wanting - and often considered inferior to those of the first Destiny - and content's been ploughed through at a rate the developers have struggled to keep up with. Throw in the lack of randomised stats (encouraging replay through grind), and you can see why many people consider the sequel to be a backwards step in terms of engagement.

To get an idea of the numbers of those who are still playing the game, we're looking at the population stats provided by Guardian.gg and DestinyTracker - two of the most commonly used third-party tools for tracking player activity and general stats in Destiny 2. Using two sources allows us to corroborate the data somewhat, although it's worth keeping in mind that these are third party sites and the information isn't straight from Bungie itself.

So, what are the numbers? How many people are playing Destiny 2?

DestinyTracker claims to track more than 8.4 million players, but the latest stats from yesterday (Sunday - typically the most popular day to play games based on Metabomb's traffic), show that 268,500 players were in the Crucible at some point, with 606,900 players taking part in PVE.

There'll be crossover between the two, of course, with many players choosing to do a bit of both PVP and PVE. Even taking the most generous combination of those stats though, we have a daily player count of 875,400 players - a mere 10% or so of those who have been tracked historically by DestinyTracker.

The stats from Guardian.gg are focused on PVP and it logged 267,893 active players yesterday from a total historical pool of 8.8 million players. These numbers do a pretty good job of corroborating the stats we've taken from DestinyTracker.

So, in the most optimistic scenario 875,000 people played Destiny 2 on Sunday 18th February 2018. It's more likely, however that the number sits somewhere between that figure and just over 600,000.

Do these numbers surprise you? Do you think the game's population is healthy, despite the drop in numbers over the last five months? Sign up and let us know what you think in the comments.