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Bobby Kotick: Destiny was not meeting expectations, tying up important development resources
- Thread starter entremet
- Start date
High Moon and VIcarious Visions did a lot of the heavy lifting for the stuff people liked.
"the stuff people liked" is a very subjective assertion. Do we have sources on the specifics of what that they worked on and that those specifics were solely done by them and not in conjunction with Bungie teams?
He probably means High Moon and Vicarious Visions who are in fact not being sacked.
Oh, I know that's the reality. I just wish that wasn't the reality.
Most companies are already mediocre. I'm fine with them being mediocre without unnecessarily disrupting a bunch of lives because insatiable people didn't make as much superfluous profit as they'd have liked to make.
The Destiny franchise is not the one over which I'll g to battle with Kotick. It's been disappointing for most of its existence.
Yeah, but should we really give a pat on the back to Bungie for fucking up not 1, but 2 Destiny games at launch, and then fixing them later on? I heard the same shit with Destiny 1.. "The game sucked at launch but now it's super good with the latest expansion!". Is this going to happen to Destiny 3? Come on.
I think Activision was expecting the deal they initially signed up to, not one where they had to divert other developers to Destiny to maintain a reasonable content schedule for the type of game it is.
I laughed at this.
Destiny had to be a solid drain on other Activision resources. Bungie was heavily reliant on all of the support studios, especially with their constant delays and pipeline issues that come with Destiny. I have no clue how Bungie plans to manage the franchise without all the safety nets they had previously.
Sure if we are living in the past, it's not a dissapointment now
But even when it was a "dissapointment" it was like one of the higher selling games of 2017
The fanbase that didn't return for forsaken were probably majority casuals with some others lost to other games
I'm sure sales numbers were fine but it was likely Bungie's poor development pipeline and less than desired player retention that did in the partnership.
You give credit when credit is do. Most games that start out bad just stay bad and are dumpstered. They turned things around. FF Realm Reborn did the same thing so did No Man's Sky. They fixed the game and made it good. I think they have already got criticism when it was in a bad place so continuing to do that even after it's better is senseless.
Such companies are not publicly traded. That said they typically have bosses that do care about making more money. It is human after all to want to make more money as you progress through your career. Especially if running a successful company.
Just watch High Moon and VV do absolutely nothing but Call of Duty updates and maps like Raven who are doomed.
I'm cautiously optimistic.
I don't have experience with NetEase, but they seem to be fairly hands-off like most Chinese publishers.
Chinese publishers are also notoriously bad at saying no, which could either lead to the greatest Destiny game ever, or an absolute monstrosity.
It's cute that you'd even think that he meant the player's expectations
Yeah, but they already had this exact same scenario play out with the first game, where it really only got more sustainably interesting when they released Taken King to right the ship like a year after launch.
I think it was safe to assume that after that Destiny 2 would be in a great place when launching only to get even better later, and it feels like they ended up taking steps backwards into the exact same problems the first game had immediately, only to right the ship again with Forsaken like a year after launch.
I can't believe I'm actually siding somewhat with Activision on this one, but it seems like there's a lot of issues with the studio as far as vision, direction and execution for this series. I can't really hold Activision accountable for that since it seems far more of a Bungie issue, and it was indeed tying up other studios just to get their proposed content out when they said it would be.
Definitely support "fuck Activision" for a lot of their practices, I'm just not sure this is one of those situations where it's so black and white.
Yeah wow, one game. Apart from that they are a CoD DLC factory.
I give credit when credit is do but..they fucked up twice. Didn't they learn anything from Destiny 1? If you fuck up one game at launch, fix it, and then fuck up the 2nd you need to re-evaluate your company hard.
You know they're missing the Guitar Hero or DJ Hero plastic-ware stuff
Then sell the songs on top, piecemeal at a time
But didn't they force them to release the game in a certain timeframe for bonuses or something weird like that?
I remember hearing Destiny 2 had a timeline imposed on the developers.
I remember hearing Destiny 2 had a timeline imposed on the developers.
How happy would you be, if you let's say had a 401k and the value never went up? Better yet you invest in the market and your money never increases?
Like it or not, why would anyone invest in a company that doesn't meet expectations when they can invest in another company that will?
Sometimes, I wonder if people forget that video games companies exist to make profit and are legally required to increase shareholder value.
It's gonna be interesting going forward to see how Bungie handles Destiny. Always seemed like such an incredibly expensive game. They can't possibly do it independently can they?
Yeah I agree, Destiny 2 may have came back around with Forsaken, but good will had finally already been destroyed beyond repair. At this point they need a new title that is not just more of the same but you can immediately tell something is different, and better about the world, gameplay etc.
I don't think a lot of people in this thread understand how how much Activision had to devote to Destiny to get anything out.
But that's this industry to a tee. Like vampires wanting to jump from the latest short-term cash cow to the next, sucking corpses dry and leaving a path of destruction in the rear mirror. Even canning or shutting down quality/talent simply because it's not "the next COD/Guitar Hero".
We're now even that insane Black Ops 4 is not meeting expectations.
Utterly unsustainable and while everyone needs to work, anyone going for interviews with some of these companies should remember just how expendable you are when it comes to the boardroom.
As much as working for a big publisher in the games industry can be a dream come true, remember talent can be brushed aside quickly if it isn't printing money like a house on fire. You exist on a year to year basis until the financials come out. That's your stability.
That was then, this is now. Every quarter is a new ball game.well...
It's hilarious that Destiny 2 outsold Madden, Zelda, and Star Wars Battlefront 2 in 2017, yet people here insist that the game had "a hardcore base but ultimately failed to have a larger audience. " Their audience is larger than virtually every other paid AAA game on the market.
At the end of the day, I think Activision did not want to spend money on an IP they couldn't control being made by a developer they couldn't control. And at the same time Bungie was clearly having trouble keeping up with regular annualized releases, and the resources required to keep on schedule seemed to be expanding. On the flip side, what did Activision gain by cutting Destiny loose? Are they going to be able to replace it with anything remotely as big?
At the end of the day, I think Activision did not want to spend money on an IP they couldn't control being made by a developer they couldn't control. And at the same time Bungie was clearly having trouble keeping up with regular annualized releases, and the resources required to keep on schedule seemed to be expanding. On the flip side, what did Activision gain by cutting Destiny loose? Are they going to be able to replace it with anything remotely as big?
yet
I kid, but you're right, VV and HM were Activision resources, but as already posted, D2 was 2017's top 3 earner and Forsaken topped the charts digitally on PS4 in September. Disappointing sales coming from Activision should have an asterisk
Why would you spend so much time on something that disappointed you?
I recognize most of these names from the D2 OT though.
Or a generation and genre defining game as Halo was.
Granted with all the talk before the launch of Destiny it sounded like it was headed that direction. It ended up being a genre defining game, but unfortunately in all the wrong ways in my eyes.
maaaybe we shouldn't be tying pensions to the performance of the market like that, though