WoW has been going forever. GTA v is older than the entire destiny franchise (d1 AND 2) and was still one of the highest grossing games in 2019. Why? They respect the player base and they add things in that we want. They understand that we want to have fun more than work. Bungie has made destiny into a full time job and increased the yearly cost by nearly double. Pretty rough for a "free to play" game versus GTA that has free updates every year.

i would consider those massively popular games as exceptions to the rule.

But the point still stands, the games that continuously add good content for reasonable and/or free pricing, and listen to the community regularly, and keep in mind the fun factor first, do well. Bungie is ONLY declining because they aren't doing ANY of that. The content is boring, tedious, repetitive, and the functions around it are bad at best. Overlapping that is the excessively over priced purchases we have to make. DLC is like 80 bucks, seasons are each 10/15 bucks, x that by 3 to 4 seasons a year, dungeons are now their own purchase. We pay 120 bucks for the whole year and yet they still charge an arm and a leg for eververse items. Like 15 bucks per armor set, per class, per season. 10 bucks for most emotes and weapon skins. Then the community expresses their frustration with the issues within the game. Poorly designed loot, boring content, RE-ISSUED CONTENT (don't even get me started on that one), and currency caps that make grinding feel worthless. All the whole crucible is more toxic than ever, in game rewards look less good than eververse purchases almost 100% of the time. The events in the game are so bad I'd personally rather have no events at all until they hire someone that actually knows how to design one. I could go on and on. These other games don't have these issues. Some sure, but not stacked up like this. Bungies biggest mistake was taking away the fun aspects of the game. The things in d1 that we loved the most. The rewards were unique and worth chasing. Weekly featured raids granted exclusive glowing armor ornaments to show off. The weekly featured raids were actually at END GAME levels as opposed to now how they are still 1350 effortless jokes with no value. D1 had the strikes that had an unlock able chest at the end which required a key to open. They had a guaranteed strike specific loot drop (either armor or weapon) which made it worth the effort. Those keys were obtainable through nightfall completions and I think stacked up to 5 or something. They had the faction specific exotics and loot pools, the vanguard had class specific rewards. The crucible had a vendor page for armor and rotating guns weekly. Nightfalls had an entire point and bounty board. Just everything about d1s basic functionality was better. The content was more fun. The story was more sound. They should've finished d2 and just started over with a d3 after beyond light.

Destiny: 388,581 avg players per day this month GTA: 98,623 Yes, GTA has free updates but their player base (units sold) of 160 million spend a lot of cheese on shark cards and the grind is just as real with a lot fewer options IMO. Destiny, 39 million units sold, still 2nd most popular MMO

Destiny is no MMO. It has no idea what it is. MMO= Massive Multiplayer Online. You can only get what 12 players on a map? That is not "massive".. Man, Defiance on the PS3 got 64 players on a Ark Fall.

Not all just look at warframe

Yes, if not far more drastic a fall off. Where at five years old they’re lucky to have 5k daily players.