Activision-Destiny 2 'was not meeting financial expectations' - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.pcgamer.com/activision-parted-with-destiny-2-because-it-was-not-meeting-our-financial-expectations/ "First, as you know, we didn't own the underlying Destiny IP," Johnson said. "And we do for all our other major franchises, which we think is not just a differentiator for us in the industry, but also controlling the underlying IP gives us the chance to move into new experiences and new engagement models, which also come with new revenue streams and of course structurally higher economics, when you own the IP." "And that leads to probably the second factor in our decision process, which is, Destiny is highly critically acclaimed, high quality content, but it was not meeting our financial expectations." The third reason, Johnson said, was that Activision's scarcest resource is developer talent, and Bungie was "tying up" some of that talent. "Which now, under the arrangement we've reached will be freed up after a short transition period," Johnson said. Basically Activision cut Bungie loose because Destiny 2 failed to meet their expectations (which everyone pretty much guessed) and they couldn't milk the IP into oblivion, probably with phone games, if "other revenue streams" is taken literally.

“Well we couldn’t add micro transactions as heavily as we wanted so we made up some ridiculous sales figures and purposefully marketed it as selling an impossible amount of copies, so we fired everyone and gave the executives a raise; should make our future games better.”

Destiny is highly critically acclaimed, high quality content Uhh, what? Since when?

Their quarterly results isn't publicized yet it seems, I'd like to read how much whoring they did to satisfy the suits.

I can't really say its this or that because I haven't played any of the games, but from what I see, they don't look like subpar below AAA studio level of quality, no matter how you put it. Weak here and there? Yes, very likely, but it honestly sounds like people demand something that they themselves don't really know what it means in the end. This isn't quite defending Activision or the game, I just feel like people sometimes call things "floaty" without meaning, for example.

Played destiny 2 when they made it free on blizzcon. Found it very boring and everyone was like "you need the expansion to make it good".

not that this justifies anything but the first game was exactly like this too. if you didn't have The Taken King, which vastly changed some aspects of the way the game is played, it just wasn't as good. then again, now that I think about it, other games in the past have been like that too. Civ V for example didn't really come into its prime until at least Gods & Kings, and depending on who you asked, it didn't get REALLY good until Brave New World

Having sunk well over 100 hours into destiny 2 i can say its a solid game. Its no halo but its got solid and satisfying gunplay. Say what you want about the story or the publisher, its a fun game until you reach the endgame grind a few dozen hours in.

I don't consider Civ V a complete game before BNW; baseline Civ V was okay and G&K improved it, but looking back on it V was basically released in unlabeled Early Access, because it was missing multiple fundamental systems that were standard in the Civ franchise, with implementations of several other fundamentals being bare (and fleshed out in the major DLCs). I was satisfied enough with vanilla V when it was all that was out, but in retrospect if you'd told me what BNW was going to do for the game at V's launch I probably wouldn't have bought it until BNW was out just so that I could enjoy the "proper" V experience without wasting dozens of hours on the less-satisfying precursor experiences. And then there was the lovable birth defect Civ BE. I really wanted Firaxis to release BE's "BNW" and would've gladly paid for an overhaul DLC, but it never came because all focus was then on Civ VI. I really wonder if BE was basically a mod of V meant to keep content teams busy while engine teams worked on VI, so they didn't have to lay off tons of people and then replace them a year later.

thats how the games are, if you don't have the latest expansion (which means having all the expansions leading up to it) you aren't going to have fun

Destiny always just seems mechanically very dull to me. None of the enemy types seem to do much other than stand still and shoot you, maybe every 50th goon you fight will throw a grenade. And you basically need to stand still for 30 seconds to even get close to dying.

Thats how bad* games are.

Sad thing is, I was thinking about getting into destiny 2 after I saw the positive feedback Forsaken was getting. Then right after Activision said they were disappointed and exploring even MORE monetization even after the cluster fuck dawning event fucked them over last year. I turned away and haven’t looked back since.

Yeah, but that didn't stop them from ruining Destiny 1, making the entire Halo dream team at Bungie quit, and crippling the franchise's future...

As somebody who bought both Destiny games, when I say it isn't fun without the expansion I don't mean "they're bullying me into buying the new content", I mean the game is busted and has fuck-all content for the first year.

yeah, D1 was busted at launch, kinda fixed up with the first few xpacs, but the taken king expansion was a HEAVY overhaul of everything about it and did the things they wanted to do much, much better. Same thing for D2, launch was rough on content, if you're a pvp head it's the same forever, and the first wave of xpacs were so weak that I accidentally finished the story's end boss thinking it was just a mid-story miniboss. The Forsaken expansion did more or less what TTK did and added a lot more depth to that side of the game, with a lot more general content to do outside of chugging through story then fucking off to grind for the raid

I legitimately went backwards from Destiny 2 (PC) to Destiny 1 (Xbone) and the difference between the games is noticable. As someone who isn't deeply invested in the plot, Destiny 1 feels leagues better. And while it's a bit short (and as are some of the DLCs); the fact Destiny 2 repeated the same fuckin' thing with some 2-3 mission long extremely boring DLC fodder was kinda sad. Destiny 1 feels like a game someone wanted to make, Destiny 2 feels like someone wanted to generate more money off the first. It really doesn't have any character.

Oh yeah, my vague post definitely didn't do justice on how shitty it really is. Even the first DLC for Destiny 1 was fucking abhorrent

Johnson sounds super salty that Bungie and everyone else thought their ideas were shit. Bo4 did all of these things and it still failed to meet investor expectations, lmao

lol, no. Bungie fucked over their own team for literal political koolaid. Bungie's current Leads also knew activision was cancer going in and went in anyway, hoping that them owning the ip would keep the Kotick Lawyer Litches at bay, and they are frankly lucky as fuck activision doesn't feel vindictive right now.

The concept of paid-for expansions to goddamn massively multiplayer games really makes me seethe. I know it's been around since at least Ultima Online (I'm sure there's been at least one or two traditional MUDs that had a sort of VIP pass for certain areas), but it's never once sat well with me. The developers/publishers know that MMO players suffer hardcore from FOMO, so they whip up a fuckton of content and then lock it behind 20-60 dollars. And if you don't fork up the money, you're suddenly missing out on things that are in every way an upgrade from the vanilla experience, and the other players get to mock you for being a filthy poorfag. I guess that's why the only MMOs I really got into were flat subscriptions or MtX-funded, like Runescape, Mabinogi, Dungeon Fighter Online, and Warframe.

Ofcourse D2 didnt meet their expectations no game they made and will ever make will meet their unrealistic and stupid expectations "First, as you know, we didn't own the underlying Destiny IP," Johnson said. "And we do for all our other major franchises, which we think is not just a differentiator for us in the industry, but also controlling the underlying IP gives us the chance to move into new experiences and new engagement models, which also come with new revenue streams and of course structurally higher economics, when you own the IP." This is probably just me but that sounds like they were implying that they would've screwed up the monetization even more if they had complete control over the Destiny IP