News Bungie, Activision part ways

I'd bet that Bungie owning Destiny was part of the terms of their deal with Activision to begin with, similar to Respawn and Titanfall.

With Desinty 2 having sold a lot less than the first despite being on three platforms Activision probably had some kind of break clause. With the company's stock price tanking it's no surprise they would start taking a hatchet to the more expensive projects. It will be interesting to see what Bungie does to rescue their reputation and Destiny going forwards. If the details of Marty O'Donnell's lawsuit are anything to go by their corporate culture has been pretty poor for years even before they got involved with Activision, but without Activision demanding targets they might be able to make Destiny more fun to actually play.

Here's hoping for a combined Destiny 1+2 re-release?

 

They would raise a huge amount of player morale by porting the D1 strikes and raids into D2!

 

Got the game free to play with friends and it would raise our morale (and likeliness to buy the expansion) if it didn't regularly kick one of us with some stupidly named error code.

 

Destiny 2 outsold Destiny 1 in its first month. In fact, Destiny 2 was 2017's best selling game within a month of launching.

Don't forget that "performing below expectations" and "under-performing" are phrases coming from Activision's share-holder meetings and are not the same as the game not selling well. Most of their expectations are completely unsustainable and unrealistic.

I thought their share price tanked right after the announcement and not before?

It's been amazing just how much that went wrong with Destiny that you can trace back to Activision. Music of the Spheres got canned because Activisions' vision did not match Bungie's and AV held the purse strings. So many things got scrapped and had to be hurriedly re-made from scratch for the same reasons. I don't think their relationship has been a happy one since the get-go.

That's not to say Bungie haven't made errors of judgement, but it feels like theirs tend to get over-turned/tweaked when the community complains. Whereas when it's a change dictated by AV... it just festers.

Really looking forward to what the future holds. Perfect outcome for me would be D1+D2, just build on that with no need to appease share-holders with regular new releases of entire games. Keep trickling the content with free events mixed in. With the benefit of cross-saves and cross-play. Xbox have been asking for that for Destiny for a while now, they've been really vocal about "working with Bungie" since the split got announced. Activision were the ones with the Sony exclusives deal, I am not sad to see that go at all! The exclusives were almost all poo anyway.

Whether they do that from D2 or they go with a 3rd instalment that's a mix of the 2 with an updated engine (we don't know if the new project Bungie announced last year is a new IP, engine or what) I'm not sure. But I am very excited for the future.

Sorry if this is incoherent garble, I've been pretty excited and talking about this with anyone who will listen since the tweet yesterday!

 

It isn't just Activision, but rather every single company involved with those "live services" games.

You have X hours per week available to play games, not one of those companies that expect you to keep playing their games for years (to remain in the monetisation circle of hell) and also buy the new ones seem to understand that X has an immutable hard cap.

 

Oh I know it's not just AV, but those phrases applied to Destiny was coming straight from those meetings.

Live services are the bane of my gaming life. I love Destiny to bits, but I struggle to keep up with everything. Then Monster Hunter: World wants me to play events every other week. It's making games like a job you have to pay to go to!

 

The best selling game of 2017 was Call of Duty: World War 2, in the US Destiny 2 was the 12th best selling title of 2017, but the best selling in September. More importantly for Activision/Bungie Destiny fell out of the top ten sales charts in the US and Europe after a month and wasn't seen again until the release of Forsaken. Depending on who's stats you look at Destiny 2 is at anything from half to two thirds of the original's total sales, not counting expansion sales for either. Activision did try to claim that D2 sold more than D1 shortly after release, but then they shut up about it when retailers began publishing numbers. ActiBliz's share price took a big dive in September when D2's sales came out as 'good, but less than D1' but that was a blip in a wider trend.

For Activision's stock price, they have the same problem as EA. From 2005 to 2015-ish they saw explosive growth as online play went from a hardcore PC thing to standard on every games console sold, they had the rise of mobile gaming and the market tolerated them increasing the cost of games by introducing season passes, lootboxes etc. But now they seem to be bouncing off the upper limit of income and have done for a couple of years now. Activision is still making obscene amounts of money, but neither Call of Duty or Overwatch have particularly grown, whilst WoW and Starcraft continue their steady decline. Both EA and Activision have had falling stock prices in this year's second half as it's become apparent that they can deliver profits but not growth, investors are mostly interested in growth.

EA pinned it's growth forecast on Star Wars (and we all know how that's gone) whilst ActiBliz seemed to have the same high hopes for Destiny. When neither has turned out to be the next Call of Duty/Halo investors have fled. Evidently Activision is not interested in trying to get Destiny growing again, they seem to have pinned their hopes on taking mobile versions of existing IP to the Far East. We'll see how that goes.

Like you said underperforming and not selling are two very different things, but underperforming is not allowed in Activision land.

 

As a Halo fan since 2002, I just have this irrational hatred of Destiny. Really quite hoping just to see the IP canned at this point.

 

I sympathise, but I also suffer an irrational hatred of any Halo title released after 2010, none of them have Grifball!

 

Destiny 2 was the 12th best-selling title for the month of December 2017. In October 2017 it was 1st. (CoD:WWII didn't come out until November). Overall, by 2018, Destiny 2 was the 2nd (or 3rd depending on sources) best-selling game of 2018. It's not a surprise it fell to 12th for December seeing as it had just been given away for free on PS+ and Battlenet.
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At least you know your hatred is irrational, but I'm not gonna lie, it doesn't make me happy knowing someone is wishing the demise of my favourite game

 

One could hope that Bungie could pull a Squeenix with Destiny. FFXIV launched as a mess with poor balance, tedious gameplay, completely atrocious UI and nonsensical controls, random regressions from the previous MMO, etc. Then got revamped as A Realm Reborn and is widely lauded as one of the top MMOs running. My experience with the free weekend on Destiny 2 certainly matches the grinding and the atrocious UI & nonsensical controls (giving all the different mappings a try and giving up was the main reason I didn't even last the weekend).