https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1488499142221512705| 860,000 players played Destiny 2 yesterday, at a slow point in a season about to end later this month
| • 275,000 on Xbox
| • 355,000 on PlayStation
| • 224,000 on Steam
| • 5,390 on Stadia
Destiny is not small.
There are maybe a dozen or so western service-games with 1M+ regular active players.
* Microsoft bought maybe four with the AB acquisition (CoD, Hearthstone, WoW, Overwatch, maybe D3 but probably not), and had one coming in (Minecraft. H:I qualifies for now, but its new and it remains to be seen if it has staying power).
* Valve owns two (CSGO, Dota2). They're extremely not for sale.
* Riot owns at least two (LoL/Valorant). Also not for sale; owned by Tencent.
* EA has a couple (Apex, maybe their sports titles as well). Likely out of reach for anyone to acquire.
* Epic, of course, has Fortnite.
* Rockstar has GTA5. T2 is probably on the acquisition block; expect that next, but who the buyer will be is anyone's guess. My pocket prediction is actually Epic.
To clarify: The reason why I narrowed that list to just western companies is because of the difficulty in both determining metrics for eastern games, and the difficulty in acquiring them. Chinese companies simply won't be acquired, and something many may not know: its very, very difficult for non-japanese companies to acquire japanese companies. There's a lot of government rules restricting it. PUBG is South Korean though, so it may qualify for the list; less familiar with SK's stance on western acquisitions.
Tangential: this is why you should laugh anyone out of the room who suggests Microsoft will buy FromSoftware. From is a fascinatingly weird company; owned by a Japanese multinational that mostly publishes manga & tabletop roleplaying games, to my knowledge From is Kadokawa's only video game subsidiary. On the one hand, they're a perfect acquisition for Sony given that Sony is Japanese and From is a weird company among Kadokawa's MO. On the other hand, its a massive profit center that I'm certain their overlords leave to their own devices.
That's essentially everything in the current gaming landscape. Once its all laid out, it should be obvious how valuable Destiny is to Sony: PlayStation isn't on that list. They do own something like 3-5% of Epic, but beyond that, they're seeing Microsoft make heavy investments in both discrete releases & ongoing service games. Sony has discrete releases MASTERED; they're the king, up there with Nintendo. But they don't have service games. To get a service game like Destiny, in a super popular genre (looter shooter RPG), for a couple billion, is a steal; even moreso that it gives them a card to play, maybe first, maybe second, if Microsoft ever moves to remove Call of Duty from PlayStation; its nuclear peace. Remember: Sony collects 30% of every CoD transaction on PlayStation. View the acquisition through this lens, and it adds further value to the transaction: if the threat of removing Destiny from Xbox, and thus Xbox's 30% cut of transactions there, keeps CoD on PlayStation a bit longer, it helps pay for itself.