Destiny 2 had its release date moved forward from September 8th to 6th for consoles but it wasn’t just out of the kindness of Bungie’s heart. Director Luke Smith told GamesRadar that was done to put less stress on servers since September 6th falls on a Wednesday.
“We were looking at a bunch of logistics; the technical diligence. Our games at Bungie historically have their highest concurrency on the Saturday of their first week. And so, by going out on a Friday, I think we were putting our technical teams at a risk.”
If servers went down on Saturday, it “could be really bad.” By releasing two days earlier than intended, the developer “pull the data in for a couple of days,” and provide server teams enough time to “adjust the scalability”. That’s if response to the game is “bigger than anticipated” and since Rise of Iron saw players thrown into a queue for the first few hours at launch, it’s a wise move indeed.
In the meantime, Destiny 2’s beta begins on July 18th for PS4 pre-orders and July 19th for Xbox One pre-orders. Everyone else gets it on July 21st while PC players can try it in “late” August.