Warframe is in ‘massive growth’ as Destiny 2 winds down, studio says

Warframe has been through "a few years of straight, just massive growth", Digital Extremes president Sheldon Carter said in an interview with Game Business reported by PC Gamer — a trajectory running opposite to that of Destiny 2, whose player numbers were in significant decline before Sony ended its development.

Carter said the original Destiny landed hard on the studio when it launched in 2014, more than a year after Warframe’s 2013 release, and that his first instinct was to compete aggressively with Bungie. That position softened over the following decade. Carter told Game Business that the end of Destiny 2 development was not welcome news internally, because staff move between the two studios and many of his developers learned the looter-shooter genre by playing Bungie’s game.

The peak that wasn’t

The growth was not a given. Carter said that four or five years ago Digital Extremes began to worry that Warframe had peaked and that it was time to plan a successor. That concern started Soulframe, the studio’s second project, but it also prompted changes to how Warframe itself was developed and promoted. Those changes, on Carter’s account, are what produced the current run — and Warframe’s health is now what gives Soulframe room to move slowly.

Soulframe was announced four years ago and remains in pre-release, still absent from Steam. Carter framed the slower pace as deliberate rather than troubled, saying that a second game at the same scope does not stop a studio repeating old mistakes, only shortens the recovery. He described the work as relearning things the studio had forgotten while building trust with an existing audience, and holding the release until there is enough content, story and gameplay behind it.

A forever game on old hardware

Carter also argued that rising hardware costs could work in Warframe’s favour. The game runs on a PS5 Pro and on an Android phone four generations old, he said, and if players are priced out of new consoles they will still have something that is continuously updated. That breadth of hardware support is the practical form of the "forever game" framing Digital Extremes uses for it — and, by Carter’s reasoning, part of why the studio has no intention of stepping back from Warframe while Soulframe takes its time.