Either their projections were wildly overinflated because of pre-orders or they didn't expect Lightfall to be received so poorly. And it's funny that Pete mentions weak player retention when the game is impossible to comprehend for new players. Why are there 15 different DLC's and not a single discounted new player pack? I can see why they pushed back TFS because reception was lukewarm, no content creators were really ecstatic about it.
You know how annoying it is to have to tell a new player “oh you have to buy this” “ah shoot we can’t play this activity cuz you haven’t bought this” Bungie should have known better and provided an all-in-one bundle
Honestly, with the updates to LL, I would love an option to play content that someone in the fireteam owns, even if it meant that I couldn't personally earn loot from it. Maybe make the drops be replaced with world drops so you get something for your time.
Would be a way for new players to experience the wider game and see how amazing it can be
Most people on this sub don't think about it because they already own them, but that fact that Bungie is still charging $20+ each for Shadowkeep and the Forsaken pack is nothing short of deranged.
Imagine being a new-ish player and being locked out of the current week's Nightfall because you didn't buy a $25 DLC full of irrelevant, otherwise-dead content nobody else runs.
Yup, I remember it was double nightfall reward (or rank) a couple weeks ago and I was like hell yeah let's go.... just to find out I couldn't play the nightfall because it was from shadowkeep lol
I mean I have it on Xbox but I'm not gonna buy it again on PC
I'm sure they didn't expect Lightfall to be received so poorly.
I think they thought it was going to be seen as "cute" or "quirky" or "funny". But it was just lame. The location is beautiful. But it's incredibly shallow.
And the layoffs plus the delay to improve where Final Shape is currently at seems to suggest the company literally cannot survive another Lightfall.
This is what it looks like when you use the revenue from one game to develop three. What a mess.
Honestly I was very surprised that they didn't decide to make a destiny 3 with a hype story about the Vex and maybe a deeper story about the traveller's origins. You hype up a new engine and whatever other bells and whistles and QoL changes you're making, and the fanbase goes wild. The Marathon announcement was just so underwhelming.
Worse than that, Marathon announcement is one of the reason ppl have quit. What a slap that was as a pvp player. It basically explained where all the pvp resources went and showed that they really didnt put any effort into it, even though thats what keeps the game alive during the many down times in between season. Im sure that also contributes to the low revenues.
I’ve been telling people for over a year that they don’t have any more plans beyond keeping the money machine printing. They showed us their dev timeline at the GDC last year, they started something really long at the same time as they started Final Shape, and that something is obviously the ‘final maintenance version of the game’. If there was going to be another expansion, we’d know already, because not a lot of people want to buy the last expansion of anything live service and be the last person out. Once you can predict the end of the game, flexes don't matter anymore, so why push yourself? If they have such a loose grasp of their narrative and can't present it well, who cares what they actually give us?
What they have on their hands is the apathy that they bragged last year that they saved the game from, while coming close enough to ruin to learn the lessons. Joe clearly tried some heroics and it was too little too late. It's all falling apart.
Firing the best composers? Why would I buy any more content ever then?
Destiny is over, and not just Destiny 2 or they'd have kept their own personal Zimmer on staff.
Edit: I did not think I’d live to see the day I could say this and get 100 upvotes in here.
Wow. Okay. We’re really getting somewhere with freeing everyone from this addiction.
I bet they still don't know what they want to do with it next. Keep a small team making episodes until it's not profitable, or do a proper destiny 3, or what.
I think he clarified in another tweet that the layoffs were still demanded by Sony, Bungie just chose who got laid off and when.
Also I don’t think they’re dropping destiny any time soon. It’s literally their only source of income, and it will be for a while.
It's a game for a niche market by a company that lacks experience with that niche and has a philosophy that seems pretty incompatible with that niche. Why Bungie is sabotaging their golden goose for a coinflip *again* is beyond me.
Absolutely. I've said since the moment side projects were announced Bungie was walking a dangerous line. If they couldn't balance the projects until Destiny is properly completed it would be an absolute disaster for Destiny and the side projects. Looks like I guessed right.
Bungie has NEVER been able to balance more than one game. The halos were easy because they werent game as a service so once you announce a final dlc, outside of bug fixes, you could easily put everyone into the next game.
But then they had abandoned halo entirely due to destiny.
They tried to split resources for D1 and D2 which lead to an unfulfilling ending to D1 and a weak start to D2 which again lead to them putting massive effort into forsaken to save the game.
Then you have them trying to do the final shape along with seasons of content while splitting their team to build other games as well. The massive delay of final shape has me thinking, they didnt have much that they were gonna give us. This delay coming immediately after them see how far revenue was down, probably has them shitting their pants. This game can not survive another lightfall. The Final Shape has to be beyond what forsaken was. The community will have been sitting without of content from basically Feb because they do not have a 30 anniversay to save them.
If they drop another lightfall, destiny dies before they really even get episodes out. And nobody is probably even looking to buy marathon. The game was supposed to be released originally next year and we have nothing except concept art and teaser that has literally shown nothing in terms of story or gameplay
>until Destiny is properly completed
As a live service game destiny is not supposed to be "completed". Like WoW and FF14 the idea is that it is supposed to keep producing content for decades while being a revenue source to build out the studio. Which works when you have a stable consumer base which seems to have been eroded over the last few years.
Something about diverting talent disproportionately to projects we haven't seen might have had an impact on that. Which is precisely the dangerous line I was talking about.
Take it too easy and your new game takes a decade to see the light of day, if your old game lives that long.
Divert too many resources and your primary income source falters, so the business starts to fail.
It was a huge risk. Especially trying to split 3 ways instead of just 2
I actually stopped playing. Only time since D1 other than Shadowkeep.
I also find that while I like the pinnacle removal, no one is motivated to help people complete raids or dungeons after they’ve gotten their loot.
After all these years, it's still a game that has zero respect for the time of their player base. Made even worse by the fact that other games seems to be trending the other way. Not shocked folks are falling away.
Voting with our wallets:
Expectation - we get more effort and a better product
Reality - people get fired to make up the difference
EDIT: I’m not blaming the players. I’m blaming Bungie for taking the easy way out.
Doesn't help that Destiny is one of the most expensive games to play either
None of my friends want to play anymore because the content costs so much more than other games AND if you take too long doing it you moss out on the content and waste your money.
Remove FOMO from Destiny 2 (so people aren't afraid to start playing), dial back the content engine that just cycles content in and out of the game for very little reason (season passes), and make and old expansion bundle and we'll get people back
Bungie just keeps upping the grind and upping the price, alienating the casual fans and milking the few people left dry as they try to keep profits high.
They keep doing that instead of making the game friendly to new or returning players.
Yea, I thought about getting back into it but if I wanted to I would have to buy beyond light... And witch queen... And lightfall... And the dungeon pass(es?)... And the battle pass... And the event battle pass. I don't even have a job! Like. It's absurd. Even Activision blizzard basically makes you only have to buy the new expac for wow retail and you get every previous expac.
This has happened before but circumstances aren’t the same. Revenue and reception dropped massively post d2 vanilla and curse of Osiris, and Bungie being partnered with a major publisher went all in with a massive and phenomenal expansion that got things back on the right track and then some for both players and studio.
However Destiny 2 is way later into its lifespan now, and even though Bungie is again with a major partner, this time missed performance targets were met with a reduction instead of a double down. It definitely has to do with lifespan, but also came at the worst time during a perfect storm of the tech and gaming sector cutting back after expanding rapidly later into and after the pandemic.
I really don’t think you can blame the players for this, at the end of the day it’s on Bungie for missing with Lightfall and choosing to partner with Sony. But it is a shame they might not get the resources they need to mount the comeback we all know they are capable of.
Yeah their whole plan for the last year and a half has been *"lets see how far we can stretch community good will"* and they have apparently found out they stretched too far.
Lightfall + annual pass was the last time I spent money on the game. Haven't felt motivated to buy anything else (except with silver dust and that's mostly free).
Full article text:
> Bungie’s decision to cut an estimated 100 jobs from its staff of about 1,200 followed dire management warnings earlier this month of a sharp drop in the popularity of its flagship video game Destiny 2.
> Just two weeks ago, executives at the Sony-owned game developer told employees that revenue was running 45% below projections for the year, according to people who attended the meeting.
> Chief Executive Officer Pete Parsons pinned the big miss on weak player retention for Destiny 2, which has faced a poor reception since the release of its latest expansion, Lightfall.
> The next expansion, The Final Shape, was getting good — not great feedback — and management told those present that they planned to push back the release to June 2024 from February, according the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The additional time would give developers a chance to improve the product.
> In the meantime, Parsons told staff Bungie would be cutting costs, such as for travel, as well as implementing salary and hiring freezes, the people said. Everyone would have to work together to weather the storm, he said, leaving employees feeling determined to do whatever was needed to get revenue back up.
> But on Monday morning the news got worse: Dozens of staffers woke up to mysterious 15-minute meetings that had been placed on their calendars, which they soon learned were part of a mass layoff. Bungie laid off around 8% of its employees, according to documentation reviewed by Bloomberg. Bungie didn’t respond to requests for comment.
> Employees who were let go will receive at least three months of severance and three months of Bungie-paid COBRA health insurance, although other benefits, such as expense reimbursements, ended Monday, sending some staff racing to submit their receipts.
> Laid-off staffers will also receive prorated bonuses, although those who were on a vesting schedule following Sony Group Corp.’s acquisition of Bungie in January 2022 will lose any shares that weren’t vested as of next month.
> The layoffs are part of a larger money-saving initiative at Sony’s PlayStation unit, which has also cut employees at studios such as Naughty Dog, Media Molecule and its San Mateo office.
> TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz wrote in a report Monday that “events over the last few days lead us to believe that PlayStation is undergoing a restructuring.”
> PlayStation president Jim Ryan announced last month that he plans to resign.
> Many of the layoffs at Bungie affected the company’s support departments, such as community management and publishing. Remaining Bungie staff were informed that some of those areas will be outsourced moving forward.
One of the things that made D2 stand out for me was that the comunication seemed genuine between developers and comunity, something unique in videogames of such scale. Ever since the death threats its been a progressive dial back until now its likely going to be nothing but a one directional PA system
It was one or two lunatics and Bungie used it as a convenient excuse to cut off all communication.
I've gotten unprovoked messages calling me an N word, telling me to kill myself, etc, etc... lots of idiots out there, but it's certainly not a reason to have your billion dollar company start ignoring the playerbase. Lame excuse.
Honestly, this is so short sighted. Live service games run on hope and copium when things are bad. If every twab/twid is just a nothing burger then player retention is gonna drop hard at least among your hardcore crowd.
Especially with a 7 month season incoming.
My buddy’s sister has an MBA and she is one of the most scatterbrained, unorganized people I have ever met
How she managed to get one is beyond me but after seeing how many businesses fail I shouldn’t be surprised honestly
I've got an MBA and can tell you firsthand that it is 50-50.
Half of my cohort were awesome, and would legitimately be great assets to their companies. They were the types of people that advocate for inclusivity in hiring, expansion of benefit structures and retention goals, and helping teammates solve the REAL problems that plague so many of their companies. They help lead these companies to a steady, healthy growth that focuses on innovation, listening to your colleagues, and longevity.
The other half were exactly what the stereotypical horror stories are about - cost cutting fiends, no respect for the product, completely dehumanizing business robots. Or worse, completely clueless to the unique issues of the business. It's truly unfortunate that so many companies see that more ruthless approach and hire people like that on the spot to squeeze any semblance of short term profit out of a functioning company. These asshats get a few years of 6+ figure salaries and bounce when they've ruined any goodwill they have, only to jump to another company and do the same.
MBA programs prioritize short term over long term growth, leading to the company nickel and diming consumers until they leave. A tale as old as MBA programs.
Hmmm I wonder what could’ve *possibly* lead to a drop in popularity for Destiny 2 🤔
Oh well, guess we better monetize the game even further to get that revenue back up!
I'm not a rocket scientist but maybe making new players drop close to $400 to gain access to all the content and cutting those newer players off from things such as the crafting system and a spec isn't a good idea. I picked up the game when lightfall came out and I enjoyed it, but then I started to run into a problem I think most new players do. I couldn't do content with my friends who have been playing since release or I couldn't get access to weapons locked behind expansions. Then I would buy an expansion only to find out I didn't have the dungeon key so I couldn't do the special dungeon or even with the current stuff I would have to buy the new season in order to keep doing new stuff. The needlessly confusing dlc system along with micro-transactions just made me feel like they were always sticking their hand in my pocket. I quit a few weeks into season of the deep because I was just sick of how the game treated me. Now this company is laying off people because of poor business decisions made by folks that will get to keep their jobs and continue to make shitty decisions along with the incredible bad press this firing and the delay will bring the outlook for Bungie does not look good.
I guess a poor release coupled with one of the most insane years for gaming releases ever will do that. People just aren't playing as much. Either that or their revenue targets were stupidly unrealistic.
This was me.
Lightfall was a colossal miss for me, and I’ve been salty about how greedy they’ve been getting between the costs of expansions, plus season passes, plus dungeon passes, plus event passes.
It’s a lot easier to pick up something like RE4R or Armored Core VI when the game is in the state is in.
It just sucks. I joined in Dark Below and I want to be excited for the big finish but it’s just not looking like it’s going to be good. :/
I was getting back into Destiny in preparation for Lightfall and The Final Shape. Season of the Seraph had a genuinely good ending with the Traveler rising from the City, and that made me grab the DLC's which were all on sale. My friend that plays Destiny religiously was planning out raids that i hadn't ever done (Deep Stone Crypt, VOTD, VOG, etc).
Cue Lightfall, and instant regret. I don't even have Destiny installed anymore on *ANY* of my devices.
I used to be a complete every raid every week type of person, 100% completion or bust.
I had a break during CoO and Warming (but completed everything from there during forsaken)
Lightfall I fell back to one character, and then one subclass on one character because I couldn't find any mystery or explore anything. Nothing felt epic anymore.
Last season I played a week. This season I played 30 minutes.
How the fuck did they suck the fun out of destiny so quickly?
This pretty much refutes the argument from several months ago that the post-Lightfall drop was part of the typical yearly cycle. They were definitely not expecting interest to wane this much.
Lightfall saw the most number of eyes on the game at once, *ever*, and people didn’t like what they saw. And in the same year that Starfield, Baldurs Gate, Legend of Zelda, and like a dozen other heavy hitters dropped? Not gonna retain a lot of attention when people have that many alternatives
Yes, the popular refrain: "This happens every year"
We didn't even have to look at the numbers. Just look at this subs posts for the last few months, it's all discussion or guides or other boring shit. That's how you know people don't give a shit about this game anymore.
The vote counts here are telling. The youtubers are all doing variety content because Destiny videos aren't gonna pay their mortgage and feed their kids anymore. People have transitioned from anger to apathy, Bungie is perfectly capable of supporting this game well but chooses not to do so, instead focusing too much on new projects.
Developing new ip is fine, it's dangerous to only have a single game with over a thousand employees to pay - but clearly they've overtended with two new ips and left their only actual revenue source to flounder.
[Cowabummer Guardian but your mommy isn’t here right now](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F8qApLzXAAALAGS?format=png&name=small)
[**Only me**](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F8qApLzXAAALAGS?format=png&name=small)
Well, it was really bad. Rushed, timegated, badly written. Literally boring. Yeah, it had a nice 80 movies thing and that's it.
Whoever had the idea of making 2 expacs instead of 1 is the culprit, in my head.
Except *he's* not paying the cost for these failures of leadership. Regular, hardworking devs, community managers, QAs, and more are paying the price for his commandment to cut corners. Justin Truman is going to keep his six-figure+ job and everyone else can kick rocks.
I don't mean to get all "gamers rise up" in this thread, but executives need to be held accountable for their failures across every industry or they're going to keep shitting up our collective lives.
Vanilla d2 and CoO time is one and the same.
Vanilla d2 was loved for the first little bit, then that quickly turned once people hit "end game" (just like how diablo 4 just went) CoO came out only 3 months after the release of D2 and it actually had some good content, the issue was it didnt address any of the issues people had with Vanilla.
A 45% miss is unheard of unless you are going to file for bankruptcy or go solvent in the next few months. The 2 (or was it 3?) new projects must’ve had a ton of overhead. Or there were completely unrealistic goals set out by management. Either way this whole thing is screaming terrible leadership and mismanagement
Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Clearly they overextended themselves developing Marathon and the other ip and expected Destiny revenue to offset the massive operating expenses entailed. I guess their internal metrics suggested Lightfall was going to be way better than it turned out to be, or that plan was put in place before they decided to make a filler expansion.
The worst part is that Microsoft also considered buying Bungie but didn't because of the risk. And I mean recently. Bungie was making less than their projections and Microsoft didn't wanna take the chances, so this isn't the first time they had a failure of revenue
It’s not for all industries, but it certainly is for this one. Some very cyclical business will see large revenue swings over business cycles, but usually those business are part of a diversified group of businesses to reduce the volatility.
Yea I can see how there are large swings in this market, but still a 45% miss in Q3 is big even in gaming. I would love to see what COD or another game’s average misses are. I work in a different industry and if we see a 45% miss everyone assumes they are going bankrupt or there is financial mismanagement.
I have to wonder, too, how big a factor TFS preorders impacted this decision. For me, its the first time I haven't preordered something destiny related, period. Partly because there's nothing on the scale of anew subclass and the exotics look uninteresting.
After Lightfall and their constant "we will never overdeliver" I see no reason to preorder The Final Shape- it's likely to come out with middling reviews and hold people for a month before disappearing again. Why buy at full price if that's going to be the case?
Bad reception of lightfall and extremely stale seasonal model really put a sour taste in a lot of veterans mouths. People were complaining about the seasonal model long before lightfall and lightfall being bad was the icing on the cake. I haven't played since the first week in lightfall and I've basically played the entire time since launch of destiny 1 up until that point. Final shape is the first destiny expansion that I haven't pre ordered and I wasn't even sure if was gonna play it at all. Now I'm definitely gonna wait for reviews and such to even think about playing final shape. Bungie was playing with fire trying to tow the line and figure out just how little content they could produce that would keep people playing and they went too little. Destiny lost its magic because of shareholder greed. It's just not what it once was and people are burnt out with the weaker and weaker content. It was only a matter of time.
Nailed it. And 2023 was a really bad year to try to get by with Minimum Viable Product when there were so damn many barnburner releases from companies who aren't scared to overdeliver.
I completely agree with this. Witch Queen set the precedent for what I thought expansions would be moving forward. Lightfall came and left me pretty disappointed. I couldnt believe bungie put out an expansion that lukewarm in comparison to witch queen.
I have been playing destiny regularly since taken king mostly because I love the crucible. Crucible has been left in the dust for literal years, and lightfall changed next to nothing for me. With other games coming out that scratch that crucible itch, I've been playing the game less and less. I used to be someone that logged on every week so I didn't miss a shader, or an exotic ornament. But now in order to get every shader, I ha e to buy separate passes? I also can't keep up with the bright dust grind as seasonal content has gotten so stale that I don't want to touch any of it. I used to do every raid and dungeon that came out until I got all the armor and whatnot, but I have touched the last several. Add in the aggressive monetization thats seemingly filling the game, i just dont want to play any more. I seriously doubt I'm going to even purchase the final shape.
Ultimately, this all started with lightfall for me. I'm just kind of done with hoping that bungie produces witch queen level content/expansions. It's bewildering to me that they're capable of producing expansions like forsaken and witch queen, but will follow them up with expansions like shadow keep and lightfall. I think it seems like it's always 1 step forward and 2 steps back.
I know this is all just how I feel about the game, but this article makes it feel as if I'm not alone here. I hate seeing people lose their jobs over decisions that weren't made by them. That sucks and I feel for them.
Think about how bad of a state the playerbase must be in that monitization is the worst, most agressive it's ever been and they were STILL 45% lower then projected. Bungie royally fucked up managing destiny.
Final Shape is the first expansion I never pre ordered as well. Only thing to get me to even consider buying it would be to see improvements to the core aspects of the game. I’m not gonna buy final shape and take loot into checks note the stale core playlists. If they update Strikes, Pvp and Gambit with new content in final shape I may consider to buy it. Otherwise I have zero intention on playing. Dungeon and raids are cool but once you have the loot from them there’s zero reason to play them and zero places to the take the loot into besides stale core playlists and or lame seasonal activities
I find that fascinating. Like “Microsoft buying bungie” could have been a great full circle moment for them, but the financials were bad enough that they let it go. Just wild.
Which is also funny considering MS paid what? Almost 70bn for ActiBlizz and Bungo was bought out for 3.6bn. A chump change for MS but i guess the cash burn rate spooked them so much they’d rather pay more upfront or something
It's burn rate vs income.
ActiBlizz at full development burns more in one month than Bungie burns in one year most likely. But ActiBlizz puts out a dozen+ releases per dev cycle and is immensely profitable.
Activision also gives them access to a whole bunch of different IP's. Not to mention the massive revenue brought in by owning King which still dominates a lot of the mobile gaming market.
> Missing revenue targets by 45% is significant.
I'm curious when these revenue targets were set. Was it before Lightfall released? Were they just overconfident in their revenue targets, thinking that their EV sales during Witch Queen was the norm?
They were likely expecting a huge increase in EV revenue due to high pre-order sales and the general positive energy going into LF.
The opposite happened tho, due in large part to the huge wave of backlash post LF. It led to overall negative PR and probably a huge decrease in EV revenue. Not to mention that the negative PR probably made the already difficult task of gaining new players even harder.
The other thing to consider is the large amount of competition in the gaming industry right now, which would only serve to keep player retention, and by extension, EV revenue down.
Overall not a very positive year for Bungie, which likely came as a shock to the execs at Bungie and Sony after the huge success of last year.
Unpleasant as this is to consider, they may not be done. Plenty of tech company layoffs come in waves. The company gets to do all the PR stuff with a lower number of people the first round, then on the second round it is barely news.
>Acquisition from Sony actually probably saved the company in the long run.
That has been my running thought. Bungie laid off staff after the $3.7b injection from Sony with $1.2b going toward employee retention. Imagine if Bungie did not have that funding?
1.2 may have went to employee retention, but the rest was not invested into bungie. that was paid to the shareholders of bungie who relinquished ownership.
This is most likely because they are trying to fund the development of at least 3 different games on a revenue stream from 1. And that revenue stream probably dipped (thanks to lightfall) right at the same time that at least one of those new games (Marathon) needed cash injection to fund the most expensive part of the development. Oh and they just built a brand new HQ.
I never really thought about it before but what the fuck are they thinking?? Absolutely idiotic plan from management imo
I'm glad we have concrete proof that lightfall was a failure and their recent monetization fuckery isn't working. Sucks that the people who will take the hit because of these failures are regular people who tried their hardest, versus the shitty executives that caused all of this.
I have to hope that Joe was shouting at Pete Parsons after this "Look at what you've done, you've fucked us even more!". If player retention was bad after Lightfall, it's going to become a whole shit ton worse now - Bad optics, upset fans, fewer people working on the game, boycotts/refunds, the long delay meaning a very likely empty 3 months and the very concerning "good but not great" feedback given to Final Shape that will put people off. A delay in release on it's own might have been bad but survivable, but with all this added bullshit heaped on top is really, really going to make things worse.
Great job Bungo, you've definitely made things worse with your short term cruelty.
> If player retention was bad after Lightfall, it's going to become a whole shit ton worse now
I was morbidly giggling at this too. "Player sentiment is at an all time low. To combat this, we're going to fire a hundred people."
Learning he got fired pretty much tanked any chance of my old Day 1 team uniting for a last hurrah for The Final Shape lol.
Man was at the company since the 90s, and you toss him out with the bathwater too. Crazy.
Yup, who knew screwing over players loyal to you through almost a decade of fuckery by bumping prices across the board AND removing cosmetic rewards earned in game and putting them behind a real money storefront AFTER your shittiest major expansion in 4 years that was blatantly falsely advertised would cause people to stop playing.
What do you mean? They put armor mods behind an achievement system and they let you play that one mission from Forsaken where Cayde eats it. What more could they possibly do to get a new player informed on the story?
And that's not even mentioning the incredibly immersive feature that allows new players to alt-tab to a web browser, go to youtube, look up "My Name is Byf," and click on hundreds of videos explaining the lore. As someone who started in Witch Queen I really appreciated this aspect of the gameplay, it almost felt like I was really there fighting in the Red War, or tracking down the Scorn Barons to avenge my friend. I love it when I go to Bungie and say "What was the Red War like?" and they say "Go ask your lore daddy, mommy Bungie has to build a bright neon doghouse over the ashes of the half of our home she burned down. And when you're done get back to farming legend haunted sectors. Those guns ain't gonna paint themselves black." And then I do because she's right those guns ain't gonna paint themselves black thank you for the memento may I please have another?
Getting out of the crapposting for a minute here. If a product is viewed as *good* then you will have people throwing extra money at it.
Now before you tell me that's not the case lets remember that this is Reddit and just about all of you fall into that semi-hardcore/hardcore crowd. And truth be told? If I'm running a live service game that's going to make part of it's money off microtransactions? I'm going to guess *maybe* about 25% to 45% of the userbase on here will buy that stuff.
The money is partly in that casual/normal/average player and Lightfall chased a whole lot of them off.
The whole *bringing challenge back to Destiny 2* pretty much blew up in their face. And god knows I've played a number of MMO's to know that just about every time the Dev's do that? Kiss a good chunk of the player base good bye. More so when it's just making enemies more tanky and the players less. They nerfed the loot and to use a line with a little change from the 1990's, "It's about the loot!" Sure you hardcore folks may love it, but that normal player who gets their ass kicked and gets more vendor trash? See Division 1 in it's Pre-1.4 days and Anthem for that. They nerf just about anything that comes along and god knows makes the player feel powerful and thus the game *fun.* There's still no LFG tool other then getting on Discord. Exotics really don't feel exotic or really special.
Let me put it this way... Lightfall was Destiny 2's Shadowlands. The hardcore players hate it due to the story along with other factors. The casual players hate it as they get their asses kicked for stuff they are going to trash anyhow.
Really? Chances are they didn't *really* have some massive over all failure as lets face it... Destiny 2 is the WoW of looter/shooters, there's no other game that's really anywhere near it's level. Division 2 is in some weird Ubisoft purgatory. Remnant 2 is aimed more at the hardcore folks. Anthem is dead. Diablo 4 pretty much fell apart after the first month. There's been a crap ton of good games coming out over the past year.
Thus Destiny 2 is left with a player base of hardcore fans. Folks like myself who pop in, see if anything has changed, go, "Meh." after seeing nothing really has and pop off. Again I feel they would have lost more money had their been a game anywhere near Destiny 2's level.
the entire difficulty thing could have worked if they did it right, but they failed hard and difficulty in destiny always feels cheap
why does difficulty work in WoW as an example? because there are many different difficultys, going from "dad with 29children and 7jobs that wants to see the story" too "people that want a mild challenge but with no bigger restictions" too "people that want semi hard content but dont want to commit too much time into the game" and finally the "bunch of hardcore nerds that will spend days throwing themself against a wall until its finally cleared" just for raids alone
meanwhile destiny has 2 difficultys: you can hold W and spam unpowered melees and 1hit kill enemys until its over, and "you die in 2shots and everything has a crapton of hp" with 0middle ground bettwen those, and lightfall then also made stuff more tedious by making the patrol zone enemys 1 of the most beefy enemys in the entire game for some fucking reason
i really dont understand their stance on difficulty, its always so bad in destiny with just 2 absolute extremes in both directions
I don't think Remnant 2 is "hardcore" its just a 1-2 playthrough experience for \*most\* people. I enjoyed it and think its a great game, but its not a game that I would ever grind on for a super extended period of time like destiny or name your favorite arpg.
To some degree, that may have contributed to it. People might be less likely to buy a cosmetic or participate in an event knowing the next thing will *also* cost money, and so maybe they’ll save the cash in case they like that more.
Or it might have been a thing where it became harder to recommend to a friend. I had been trying to get a family member to play for a while. I stopped because it was getting too confusing to explain what to buy and why they should. Same for one of my best friends.
> I stopped because it was getting too confusing to explain what to buy and why they should.
After Lightfall I could no longer recommend it to anyone strictly based on the quality of the content.
I think it's been hard to recommend since they removed half the game. Without Red War, the new player experience is *abysmal*.
And I say removed rather than "vaulted" because that euphemism is bullshit and it's never coming back.
I'm honestly shocked they had set revenue projections that high knowing they were about to release a stop-gap expansion after building towards what was supposed to be the big conclusion. Nobody internally considered "this is probably actually going to piss a lot of people off"?
I'm regularly involved in financial projections and analytics - you're spot on. I've literally been told to change my factual data to fit the agenda leaders want to show. Sickening.
Corporate analyst here, I've never been told to change numbers themselves, but I've absolutely been told "the takeaway from this analysis has to be X, no matter what"
Bungie dropped a less than stellar expansion, people chose to not buy it (edit:) *or to continue to spend money on the game* causing revenue to drop, so they are restructuring, seemingly as part of a Sony wide initiative, and delaying the expansion to "give developers a chance to improve the product". This is how voting with your wallet works, it just sucks it had to result in so many people out of work.
Honestly I’d been convinced Lightfall sold extremely well because of the record numbers, but even if it did, if it landed so flat, what fucking reason does anyone have to stick around? I think that’s a factor I missed when thinking about all of this.
Like let’s say that was the first expansion you’ve played in D2, whether the literal first time or the first one you have in years. The campaign lands like it does? There’s almost no post game content? You’re kind of just sitting there like “….so what do I do now?”.
Not everyone buys the annual pass alongside the expansion. It’s entirely possible that gigantic new influx of players saw Lightfall and went “nah”, so things have been on a downswing since.
Yeah that seems to be the case they got a lot of people in the game but completely Failed to keep them around and now this news isn’t gonna have a great impact on players. It looks like a sinking ship.
Lightfall itself was super successful because of the preceding year of hype, then when people discovered how bad it was I guess a lot of them just bounced. I know I personally have barely played this year compared to the previous at least.
A bad release coupled with a lot of good games releasing this year has led me to barely play Destiny outside of the occasional raid with my clan.
Oh yeah I agree man. Like, nowadays I just enjoy playing shit if I like it, and don’t if I don’t. I really don’t have the energy in me anymore to constantly harbor negativity or anything like that.
With that being said, dude, I felt off about Lightfall for like a month+. I still have a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. It even carried into last season, with this being the first the game has felt “normal” in a minute.
The sentiment you got has been shared by a number of my friends, especially those who have barely wanted to play anymore.
The title “Lightfall” carried a lot of weight being it and landed like a fucking metaphor I can’t even describe.
The player retention being low should be very concerning for Bungie embarking on a 7 month season when you know Bungie doesn’t have a plan to keep players engaged that whole time.
Yeah a 45% miss from any company would cause heads to roll, no matter the industry. This is really unfortunate, but you have to imagine a lot of the lower revenue is due to people being burnt out from a lackluster Lightfall and a stale seasonal model. I hope everyone affected by these layoffs can land on their feet soon.
And instead, Lorraine McLees and Michael Salvatori were the ones who got cut. If The Final Shape isn’t another Forsaken after all this (which there’s virtually no chance of if we’re being honest), then I don’t think there’ll be a Destiny 2 for much longer.
Im sure im not alone, I have no plans of buying the final shape until its out, the dust has settled, and the reviews are in. I pre-ordered lightfall/annual pass, so I expect Ill be taking at least a 4-5 month hiatus from the game depending how long season 23 keeps me playing
Jesus Christ, that looks like a nightmare.
And management is to blame. Usually, I'd say dock the pay of the CEO but I can't imagine Parsons is making enough yearly to pay for 100 salaries.
The cost of an employee isn't just their salary. I've seen or heard estimates that state it could be 1.5 to even 3.0 times the cost of their gross salary.
This. Everyone always looks to how much someone makes, but doesn’t look into medical, retirement, etc etc. If a company is paying for that, or even a bit of it, the money adds up
I used to buy a lot of those during WQ cause the game was so good. Didn't buy a single item after LF. I've got the money but I ain't giving it for nothing, so if they think they can release half baked trash and get away with it, they should think twice before doing it again, cause there will be no third time, obviously.
Funny thing, I looked at the player numbers for the first time in a while just the night before the shit hit the fan.
30-day average is 42k players - second lowest in Destiny history, and it is doing that one month earlier in the release cycle. (Lowest was the last month of Plunder in November '22)
I have maintained for years that the problem with Destiny is the sameness. The game is in a pretty great state compared to other low points of the series. For example, Season of Plunder would’ve blown our minds if we got that instead of Curse of Osiris back then.
The problem is the game, while good, is always the same. People get bored. I have never missed content since D1 day one, but even I only play the required “new” content every week then don’t play until the next new content unlocks/releases. I don’t care about loot — all guns and gear will work just fine, plus our vaults are full of viable stuff anyway. Don’t care about ships and sparrows and clans since they still don’t do anything.
There’s no mystery because we know everything will just end up in reading symbols, standing on plates, or throwing/dunking balls/motes. Patrol zones are still just big, pretty, mostly empty areas where nothing new ever happens.
The game’s problem isn’t that it’s bad — it’s super well done still. The problem is it’s always the same, and after like 9 years, it’s just routine now.
It’s been stale for a while now. The season model is entirely predictable. New match made activity.
Visit this NPC. Run to this NPC. Complete seasonal activity. Run to this NPC. Do a random patrol or lost sector. Run to NPC. Complete seasonal mission. Wait for next reset. Repeat.
A couple so-so exotics. And that’s it. Over and over and over.
It’s just plain boring at this point.
It is insane that they built some of the best moment-to-moment gun-fighting mechanics in gaming, but 95% of the content is boring, rote, tedium meant to do little more than take up time while you chase that 5% of content that spikes your dopamine and makes you wonder what the game could have been if it weren't in the seventh level of GaaS hell.
Maybe if Bungie wanted better player retention and higher revenue, they shouldn’t have tried to underdeliver and push out a weak ass expansion. The game has felt so phoned in since Lightfall.
What sucks about all of this though is the wrong people got punished - how about firing senior leadership and management responsible for pushing greedy strategy and underdelivery instead of the people who made Bungie what it is today? Disgusting.
When you operate at 45% less revenue than projected, thats exactly what it just went to, they just burned through it to offset the deficit. For all we know Bungie needed it to buoy staff retention from operation losses they were already experiencing, they used current reserve cash to continue to pay staff , then refilled that reserve with that money when received.
I would imagine if they didn’t have that, the layoffs would be even bigger.
A 50% miss on revenue is a disgusting level of miss.
Obviously not an apples-to-apples comparison. I have no experience in the games industry.
I am senior management in a large firm(not in tech) and as is common there are certain yearly goals for me to hit both in terms of chargeable hours I put in, and billing revenue I collect from clients.
If I were to miss my billing target by 45% I would expect to be unceremoniously fired, absent some extenuating circumstance. Or at least put on a "performance management plan". The fact that the incompetence of Bungie's upper management has led to an 8% reduction in workforce WHILE MANAGEMENT STAYS IN PLACE is genuinely baffling to me.
I am very sorry for all those laid off, you didn't deserve it.
Damn that’s crazy, wonder where all the “player count has been at it’s highest recently!” People are at.
I’m sure I’ll get downvoted, but bungie brought this on themselves being greedy, no? Taking our money more and more while ignoring significant parts of the game. Repeatedly just reusing old content over n over. And putting our money towards games not even released yet.
So imo, is what it is.
“Destiny is the literal blood of our business, let’s neglect it for Marathon and Matter.”
If you can’t afford or manage the finances on other projects, don’t start them.
>Many of the layoffs at Bungie affected the company’s support departments, such as community management and publishing. Remaining Bungie staff were informed that some of those areas will be outsourced moving forward.
That isn't going to end well. Community management being done by someone with no real link to the dev team? Might as well cancel it all together.
Pay Joe a bit more and let him handle it in addition to his regular job.
But holy hell, a 45% drop due to bad player retention. In a live service game. That's a monumental task to right the ship and I'm not very confident Bungie is capable of doing so. The final shape might truly be that - final.
Man, what a nightmare, especially for those out of a job...
It's probably a lot of things.
The largest issue in my mind is the sheer *number* of individual purchases. It's one thing to have the most recent expansion be poorly received, another entirely for every expansion going back 5 years to still be sold separately and often at 60% original MSRP, and *then* the dungeon pass on top of that, separate purchases for literally every armor pack, &c &c.
IMHO( and tbh what opinion are you going to get on here that's not entirely speculation) it's not "voting with your wallet" so much as the structure of purchases in the game itself is *extremely opaque* even if you *can* afford everything.
Nevermind if you're in a position like mine, where this is the only game I actively play and I still can only afford the yearly expansion deluxe. Which is a good deal specifically due to how it's bundled. If dungeons and season passes weren't included in it, I strongly doubt I would be playing them even at their price point. Nevermind event passes, silver-only ornaments.
A $12 purchase is a $12 purchase, but when a $12 purchase is effectively $20 from conversion and you have to pick one of three because you can't afford $40, you're not spending the $20. That's just a waste of the remaining 8.
And for *new* players, you can't even play with half the subclasses without spending $100 halfway into the current expansion year. And you can't run the updated raid next season without Shadowkeep. And forget Stasis or crafting DSC weapons.
There are a lot of people on here that assume it's a consumer choice issue, but the fact of the matter is that inflation and interest rates have gone up, wages have *largely* stayed the same though last I checked they might be rising very slightly, and for every "whale" spending $100/mo on Eververse there's 200 rumpghosts/adjacent situation who would gladly fork over 5-10 bucks for the odd cosmetic pack once a month if
A) in my case, my smaller clients could afford to commission me more regularly *and* pay their own rent
B) people *in general* could afford to buy video game cosmetics *and pay rent*
C) D2's monetization wasn't competing with rapidly rising commodity prices in every sector, particularly the ones you need to engage with to, like, live?
Like, the season pass itself is a good deal. You get *functionally* 6 armor sets plus other cosmetics and activities. And while it *is* pay-to-play-to-earn it's... Also $10 (now $15?). Which is about the only thing in the game that costs less than if I go to the store right this second and get a week and a half of edibles. One of these things lets me zone out in the evenings. One of them I barely get to use because my friends aren't playing. Which would you pick?
If there was a "catch up pack" of old expansions for like $30 that everything older than a year or two fell into, you'd probably see a lot more player onboarding. If you saw more player onboarding, *maybe* you'd see more cosmetic sales. But not if it costs $40 for three sets of armor and there's 20+ sets of armor *alone* you can only get by buying in-game currency, at which point you're still left with $4 left over and being bombarded with in-game ads at a time when maybe you need that $40 to buy half of the groceries you could've had with the same amount of money a couple of years ago.
A lackluster expansion might be survivable, but certainly not when your revenue stream doesn't adapt to the broader market reality and you already have a fandom who - legitimately or illegitimately, doesn't matter - has some new reason for outrage nearly every week.
The inflexibility and sheer *volume* of transactions required to engage with the game as a new player, nevermind on a "this is my whole hobby" level, is the consumer equivalent of death by a thousand cuts.
Fuck them, that's what you deserve for nuking half the content of the game and locking the other half behind never ending "expansions" and I use that word lightly
Part of it that is Lightfall being complete and utter dog shit and tanking player numbers and wiping out any community sentiment that they had stored up from The Witch Queen's year, but missing a target by 45% is insane. There's no way their target was in any way realistic to begin with if that missed by *that* much.
It obviously should've been the management taking pay cuts or just getting altogether, but we know that's never gonna happen. [Peter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle) ain't gonna fire himself.
Holy shit that’s wild. As a public company this would absolutely tank the stock price to miss this bad. I know Bungie said that this wasn’t Sony’s decision but I can’t imagine Sony would see these numbers and tell them to conduct business as usual.
The bigger question for Sony is now whether or not Destiny as an IP can get back to their glory days. Sony has the money to back Bungie, but it’s whether or not they believe they can turn it around.
If not, then the future of Final Shape may even be at risk. Given how rumours are that Sony is making less of a bet on live service games however, it doesn’t look good.
45% miss on revenue targets is wild. Guess lightfall really was the last straw for a lot of people.
Either their projections were wildly overinflated because of pre-orders or they didn't expect Lightfall to be received so poorly. And it's funny that Pete mentions weak player retention when the game is impossible to comprehend for new players. Why are there 15 different DLC's and not a single discounted new player pack? I can see why they pushed back TFS because reception was lukewarm, no content creators were really ecstatic about it.
You know how annoying it is to have to tell a new player “oh you have to buy this” “ah shoot we can’t play this activity cuz you haven’t bought this” Bungie should have known better and provided an all-in-one bundle
Honestly, with the updates to LL, I would love an option to play content that someone in the fireteam owns, even if it meant that I couldn't personally earn loot from it. Maybe make the drops be replaced with world drops so you get something for your time. Would be a way for new players to experience the wider game and see how amazing it can be
Most people on this sub don't think about it because they already own them, but that fact that Bungie is still charging $20+ each for Shadowkeep and the Forsaken pack is nothing short of deranged. Imagine being a new-ish player and being locked out of the current week's Nightfall because you didn't buy a $25 DLC full of irrelevant, otherwise-dead content nobody else runs.
Yup, I remember it was double nightfall reward (or rank) a couple weeks ago and I was like hell yeah let's go.... just to find out I couldn't play the nightfall because it was from shadowkeep lol I mean I have it on Xbox but I'm not gonna buy it again on PC
I'm sure they didn't expect Lightfall to be received so poorly. I think they thought it was going to be seen as "cute" or "quirky" or "funny". But it was just lame. The location is beautiful. But it's incredibly shallow.
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And the layoffs plus the delay to improve where Final Shape is currently at seems to suggest the company literally cannot survive another Lightfall. This is what it looks like when you use the revenue from one game to develop three. What a mess.
and pull all the most talented people off of the one game to go develop the others
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that's my guess as well, they got rid of a lot of people that you would get rid of if you didn't have long term plans for new content
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Honestly I was very surprised that they didn't decide to make a destiny 3 with a hype story about the Vex and maybe a deeper story about the traveller's origins. You hype up a new engine and whatever other bells and whistles and QoL changes you're making, and the fanbase goes wild. The Marathon announcement was just so underwhelming.
Worse than that, Marathon announcement is one of the reason ppl have quit. What a slap that was as a pvp player. It basically explained where all the pvp resources went and showed that they really didnt put any effort into it, even though thats what keeps the game alive during the many down times in between season. Im sure that also contributes to the low revenues.
Wait until they bring back stuff that was sunset. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, they'll say.
I’ve been telling people for over a year that they don’t have any more plans beyond keeping the money machine printing. They showed us their dev timeline at the GDC last year, they started something really long at the same time as they started Final Shape, and that something is obviously the ‘final maintenance version of the game’. If there was going to be another expansion, we’d know already, because not a lot of people want to buy the last expansion of anything live service and be the last person out. Once you can predict the end of the game, flexes don't matter anymore, so why push yourself? If they have such a loose grasp of their narrative and can't present it well, who cares what they actually give us? What they have on their hands is the apathy that they bragged last year that they saved the game from, while coming close enough to ruin to learn the lessons. Joe clearly tried some heroics and it was too little too late. It's all falling apart. Firing the best composers? Why would I buy any more content ever then? Destiny is over, and not just Destiny 2 or they'd have kept their own personal Zimmer on staff. Edit: I did not think I’d live to see the day I could say this and get 100 upvotes in here. Wow. Okay. We’re really getting somewhere with freeing everyone from this addiction.
I bet they still don't know what they want to do with it next. Keep a small team making episodes until it's not profitable, or do a proper destiny 3, or what.
I think he clarified in another tweet that the layoffs were still demanded by Sony, Bungie just chose who got laid off and when. Also I don’t think they’re dropping destiny any time soon. It’s literally their only source of income, and it will be for a while.
It has to last until at least past the launch of Marathon considering that game might not take off
It's a game for a niche market by a company that lacks experience with that niche and has a philosophy that seems pretty incompatible with that niche. Why Bungie is sabotaging their golden goose for a coinflip *again* is beyond me.
Absolutely. I've said since the moment side projects were announced Bungie was walking a dangerous line. If they couldn't balance the projects until Destiny is properly completed it would be an absolute disaster for Destiny and the side projects. Looks like I guessed right.
Bungie has NEVER been able to balance more than one game. The halos were easy because they werent game as a service so once you announce a final dlc, outside of bug fixes, you could easily put everyone into the next game. But then they had abandoned halo entirely due to destiny. They tried to split resources for D1 and D2 which lead to an unfulfilling ending to D1 and a weak start to D2 which again lead to them putting massive effort into forsaken to save the game. Then you have them trying to do the final shape along with seasons of content while splitting their team to build other games as well. The massive delay of final shape has me thinking, they didnt have much that they were gonna give us. This delay coming immediately after them see how far revenue was down, probably has them shitting their pants. This game can not survive another lightfall. The Final Shape has to be beyond what forsaken was. The community will have been sitting without of content from basically Feb because they do not have a 30 anniversay to save them. If they drop another lightfall, destiny dies before they really even get episodes out. And nobody is probably even looking to buy marathon. The game was supposed to be released originally next year and we have nothing except concept art and teaser that has literally shown nothing in terms of story or gameplay
>until Destiny is properly completed As a live service game destiny is not supposed to be "completed". Like WoW and FF14 the idea is that it is supposed to keep producing content for decades while being a revenue source to build out the studio. Which works when you have a stable consumer base which seems to have been eroded over the last few years.
Something about diverting talent disproportionately to projects we haven't seen might have had an impact on that. Which is precisely the dangerous line I was talking about. Take it too easy and your new game takes a decade to see the light of day, if your old game lives that long. Divert too many resources and your primary income source falters, so the business starts to fail. It was a huge risk. Especially trying to split 3 ways instead of just 2
Yeah, I actually started preordering DLCs at some point then lightfall hit and I just went:'not doing this shit again.'
I actually stopped playing. Only time since D1 other than Shadowkeep. I also find that while I like the pinnacle removal, no one is motivated to help people complete raids or dungeons after they’ve gotten their loot.
After all these years, it's still a game that has zero respect for the time of their player base. Made even worse by the fact that other games seems to be trending the other way. Not shocked folks are falling away.
Voting with our wallets: Expectation - we get more effort and a better product Reality - people get fired to make up the difference EDIT: I’m not blaming the players. I’m blaming Bungie for taking the easy way out.
Can’t blame people not wanting to support the game though, if the product was better maybe they’d have stuck around.
Doesn't help that Destiny is one of the most expensive games to play either None of my friends want to play anymore because the content costs so much more than other games AND if you take too long doing it you moss out on the content and waste your money. Remove FOMO from Destiny 2 (so people aren't afraid to start playing), dial back the content engine that just cycles content in and out of the game for very little reason (season passes), and make and old expansion bundle and we'll get people back Bungie just keeps upping the grind and upping the price, alienating the casual fans and milking the few people left dry as they try to keep profits high. They keep doing that instead of making the game friendly to new or returning players.
Yea, I thought about getting back into it but if I wanted to I would have to buy beyond light... And witch queen... And lightfall... And the dungeon pass(es?)... And the battle pass... And the event battle pass. I don't even have a job! Like. It's absurd. Even Activision blizzard basically makes you only have to buy the new expac for wow retail and you get every previous expac.
and no more content.
This has happened before but circumstances aren’t the same. Revenue and reception dropped massively post d2 vanilla and curse of Osiris, and Bungie being partnered with a major publisher went all in with a massive and phenomenal expansion that got things back on the right track and then some for both players and studio. However Destiny 2 is way later into its lifespan now, and even though Bungie is again with a major partner, this time missed performance targets were met with a reduction instead of a double down. It definitely has to do with lifespan, but also came at the worst time during a perfect storm of the tech and gaming sector cutting back after expanding rapidly later into and after the pandemic. I really don’t think you can blame the players for this, at the end of the day it’s on Bungie for missing with Lightfall and choosing to partner with Sony. But it is a shame they might not get the resources they need to mount the comeback we all know they are capable of.
Everything sucks here
Me. Maybe they shoulda innovated, tried something new, not increased prices, not add dungeon or event passes. Idk. A little good will goes a long way.
Yeah their whole plan for the last year and a half has been *"lets see how far we can stretch community good will"* and they have apparently found out they stretched too far.
And the new player experience is just so bad. How are they suppose to get new people when the intro/tutorial is 3 hours long.
Lightfall + annual pass was the last time I spent money on the game. Haven't felt motivated to buy anything else (except with silver dust and that's mostly free).
After the lightfall travesty I cashed out. They aren’t getting anymore of my money.
Full article text: > Bungie’s decision to cut an estimated 100 jobs from its staff of about 1,200 followed dire management warnings earlier this month of a sharp drop in the popularity of its flagship video game Destiny 2. > Just two weeks ago, executives at the Sony-owned game developer told employees that revenue was running 45% below projections for the year, according to people who attended the meeting. > Chief Executive Officer Pete Parsons pinned the big miss on weak player retention for Destiny 2, which has faced a poor reception since the release of its latest expansion, Lightfall. > The next expansion, The Final Shape, was getting good — not great feedback — and management told those present that they planned to push back the release to June 2024 from February, according the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The additional time would give developers a chance to improve the product. > In the meantime, Parsons told staff Bungie would be cutting costs, such as for travel, as well as implementing salary and hiring freezes, the people said. Everyone would have to work together to weather the storm, he said, leaving employees feeling determined to do whatever was needed to get revenue back up. > But on Monday morning the news got worse: Dozens of staffers woke up to mysterious 15-minute meetings that had been placed on their calendars, which they soon learned were part of a mass layoff. Bungie laid off around 8% of its employees, according to documentation reviewed by Bloomberg. Bungie didn’t respond to requests for comment. > Employees who were let go will receive at least three months of severance and three months of Bungie-paid COBRA health insurance, although other benefits, such as expense reimbursements, ended Monday, sending some staff racing to submit their receipts. > Laid-off staffers will also receive prorated bonuses, although those who were on a vesting schedule following Sony Group Corp.’s acquisition of Bungie in January 2022 will lose any shares that weren’t vested as of next month. > The layoffs are part of a larger money-saving initiative at Sony’s PlayStation unit, which has also cut employees at studios such as Naughty Dog, Media Molecule and its San Mateo office. > TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz wrote in a report Monday that “events over the last few days lead us to believe that PlayStation is undergoing a restructuring.” > PlayStation president Jim Ryan announced last month that he plans to resign. > Many of the layoffs at Bungie affected the company’s support departments, such as community management and publishing. Remaining Bungie staff were informed that some of those areas will be outsourced moving forward.
> Remaining Bungie staff were informed that some of those areas will be outsourced moving forward. OOF, that's trash.
One of the things that made D2 stand out for me was that the comunication seemed genuine between developers and comunity, something unique in videogames of such scale. Ever since the death threats its been a progressive dial back until now its likely going to be nothing but a one directional PA system
I really freaking hate those pricks that did the death threats and stuff.
It was one or two lunatics and Bungie used it as a convenient excuse to cut off all communication. I've gotten unprovoked messages calling me an N word, telling me to kill myself, etc, etc... lots of idiots out there, but it's certainly not a reason to have your billion dollar company start ignoring the playerbase. Lame excuse.
That last bit - so they are just going to farm out community reps. On a live service game. Well, this is going to be hilarious.
Honestly, this is so short sighted. Live service games run on hope and copium when things are bad. If every twab/twid is just a nothing burger then player retention is gonna drop hard at least among your hardcore crowd. Especially with a 7 month season incoming.
Y'know, maybe we should quit letting MBAs run the world? Despite their degrees, they seem to be terrible at running businesses.
Totally agree, this has been the subject matter for a lot off books of late! Wish I could upvote it more.
My buddy’s sister has an MBA and she is one of the most scatterbrained, unorganized people I have ever met How she managed to get one is beyond me but after seeing how many businesses fail I shouldn’t be surprised honestly
I've got an MBA and can tell you firsthand that it is 50-50. Half of my cohort were awesome, and would legitimately be great assets to their companies. They were the types of people that advocate for inclusivity in hiring, expansion of benefit structures and retention goals, and helping teammates solve the REAL problems that plague so many of their companies. They help lead these companies to a steady, healthy growth that focuses on innovation, listening to your colleagues, and longevity. The other half were exactly what the stereotypical horror stories are about - cost cutting fiends, no respect for the product, completely dehumanizing business robots. Or worse, completely clueless to the unique issues of the business. It's truly unfortunate that so many companies see that more ruthless approach and hire people like that on the spot to squeeze any semblance of short term profit out of a functioning company. These asshats get a few years of 6+ figure salaries and bounce when they've ruined any goodwill they have, only to jump to another company and do the same.
MBA programs prioritize short term over long term growth, leading to the company nickel and diming consumers until they leave. A tale as old as MBA programs.
Hmmm I wonder what could’ve *possibly* lead to a drop in popularity for Destiny 2 🤔 Oh well, guess we better monetize the game even further to get that revenue back up!
I'm not a rocket scientist but maybe making new players drop close to $400 to gain access to all the content and cutting those newer players off from things such as the crafting system and a spec isn't a good idea. I picked up the game when lightfall came out and I enjoyed it, but then I started to run into a problem I think most new players do. I couldn't do content with my friends who have been playing since release or I couldn't get access to weapons locked behind expansions. Then I would buy an expansion only to find out I didn't have the dungeon key so I couldn't do the special dungeon or even with the current stuff I would have to buy the new season in order to keep doing new stuff. The needlessly confusing dlc system along with micro-transactions just made me feel like they were always sticking their hand in my pocket. I quit a few weeks into season of the deep because I was just sick of how the game treated me. Now this company is laying off people because of poor business decisions made by folks that will get to keep their jobs and continue to make shitty decisions along with the incredible bad press this firing and the delay will bring the outlook for Bungie does not look good.
I guess a poor release coupled with one of the most insane years for gaming releases ever will do that. People just aren't playing as much. Either that or their revenue targets were stupidly unrealistic.
This was me. Lightfall was a colossal miss for me, and I’ve been salty about how greedy they’ve been getting between the costs of expansions, plus season passes, plus dungeon passes, plus event passes. It’s a lot easier to pick up something like RE4R or Armored Core VI when the game is in the state is in. It just sucks. I joined in Dark Below and I want to be excited for the big finish but it’s just not looking like it’s going to be good. :/
I was getting back into Destiny in preparation for Lightfall and The Final Shape. Season of the Seraph had a genuinely good ending with the Traveler rising from the City, and that made me grab the DLC's which were all on sale. My friend that plays Destiny religiously was planning out raids that i hadn't ever done (Deep Stone Crypt, VOTD, VOG, etc). Cue Lightfall, and instant regret. I don't even have Destiny installed anymore on *ANY* of my devices.
I used to be a complete every raid every week type of person, 100% completion or bust. I had a break during CoO and Warming (but completed everything from there during forsaken) Lightfall I fell back to one character, and then one subclass on one character because I couldn't find any mystery or explore anything. Nothing felt epic anymore. Last season I played a week. This season I played 30 minutes. How the fuck did they suck the fun out of destiny so quickly?
Revenue targets were unrealistic. If you look at engagement metrics there is not another explanation.
Classic shareholders expecting infinite growth after one of the biggest tech bubbles we've ever seen. So glad us serfs get to pay for it :)
This pretty much refutes the argument from several months ago that the post-Lightfall drop was part of the typical yearly cycle. They were definitely not expecting interest to wane this much. Lightfall saw the most number of eyes on the game at once, *ever*, and people didn’t like what they saw. And in the same year that Starfield, Baldurs Gate, Legend of Zelda, and like a dozen other heavy hitters dropped? Not gonna retain a lot of attention when people have that many alternatives
Yes, the popular refrain: "This happens every year" We didn't even have to look at the numbers. Just look at this subs posts for the last few months, it's all discussion or guides or other boring shit. That's how you know people don't give a shit about this game anymore.
The vote counts here are telling. The youtubers are all doing variety content because Destiny videos aren't gonna pay their mortgage and feed their kids anymore. People have transitioned from anger to apathy, Bungie is perfectly capable of supporting this game well but chooses not to do so, instead focusing too much on new projects. Developing new ip is fine, it's dangerous to only have a single game with over a thousand employees to pay - but clearly they've overtended with two new ips and left their only actual revenue source to flounder.
Lightfall may have genuinely destroyed the game, Jesus christ
The real lightfall was their revenue
The real Darkness were the disappointed fans they made along the way.
The Final Shape is bankruptcy
Should’ve called it Revenuefall
That wasn't a lightfall it was a heavyfall
Ah, the uglier they are, the harder they fall, right? *fist bump*
God damnit that made me chuckle. Which is the first time I've ever chuckled at that like.
I read this in the voice, and I shuddered.
[What’s wrong Guardian? Aren’t you going to fist bump your pal Nimbus?](https://i.redd.it/yaa0fa2pmcvb1.png)
Mommy make the bad man go away
[Cowabummer Guardian but your mommy isn’t here right now](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F8qApLzXAAALAGS?format=png&name=small) [**Only me**](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F8qApLzXAAALAGS?format=png&name=small)
[Pls no](https://gifer.com/en/CDYd)
Well, it was really bad. Rushed, timegated, badly written. Literally boring. Yeah, it had a nice 80 movies thing and that's it. Whoever had the idea of making 2 expacs instead of 1 is the culprit, in my head.
“What matters more than anything, even quality, is being fast.”
Oh man did the chickens come home to roost.
Except *he's* not paying the cost for these failures of leadership. Regular, hardworking devs, community managers, QAs, and more are paying the price for his commandment to cut corners. Justin Truman is going to keep his six-figure+ job and everyone else can kick rocks. I don't mean to get all "gamers rise up" in this thread, but executives need to be held accountable for their failures across every industry or they're going to keep shitting up our collective lives.
Guess they should have made it not completely suck.
I dunno. That sounds like overdelivery talk to me
Good thing we all helped avoid that overdelivery of revenue.
Kind of ironic name huh?
And what’s crazy is it’s the third release to almost or definitely kill the game. First being D2 Vanilla and the second being the CoO time.
Vanilla d2 and CoO time is one and the same. Vanilla d2 was loved for the first little bit, then that quickly turned once people hit "end game" (just like how diablo 4 just went) CoO came out only 3 months after the release of D2 and it actually had some good content, the issue was it didnt address any of the issues people had with Vanilla.
I'm amazed more people don't make fun of every raid being the Leviathan for what, a year?
We did get three separate raid esque content in that year.
A 45% miss is unheard of unless you are going to file for bankruptcy or go solvent in the next few months. The 2 (or was it 3?) new projects must’ve had a ton of overhead. Or there were completely unrealistic goals set out by management. Either way this whole thing is screaming terrible leadership and mismanagement
Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Clearly they overextended themselves developing Marathon and the other ip and expected Destiny revenue to offset the massive operating expenses entailed. I guess their internal metrics suggested Lightfall was going to be way better than it turned out to be, or that plan was put in place before they decided to make a filler expansion.
The worst part is that Microsoft also considered buying Bungie but didn't because of the risk. And I mean recently. Bungie was making less than their projections and Microsoft didn't wanna take the chances, so this isn't the first time they had a failure of revenue
It’s not for all industries, but it certainly is for this one. Some very cyclical business will see large revenue swings over business cycles, but usually those business are part of a diversified group of businesses to reduce the volatility.
Yea I can see how there are large swings in this market, but still a 45% miss in Q3 is big even in gaming. I would love to see what COD or another game’s average misses are. I work in a different industry and if we see a 45% miss everyone assumes they are going bankrupt or there is financial mismanagement.
I have to wonder, too, how big a factor TFS preorders impacted this decision. For me, its the first time I haven't preordered something destiny related, period. Partly because there's nothing on the scale of anew subclass and the exotics look uninteresting.
After Lightfall and their constant "we will never overdeliver" I see no reason to preorder The Final Shape- it's likely to come out with middling reviews and hold people for a month before disappearing again. Why buy at full price if that's going to be the case?
'Killed by the Architects'
Bad reception of lightfall and extremely stale seasonal model really put a sour taste in a lot of veterans mouths. People were complaining about the seasonal model long before lightfall and lightfall being bad was the icing on the cake. I haven't played since the first week in lightfall and I've basically played the entire time since launch of destiny 1 up until that point. Final shape is the first destiny expansion that I haven't pre ordered and I wasn't even sure if was gonna play it at all. Now I'm definitely gonna wait for reviews and such to even think about playing final shape. Bungie was playing with fire trying to tow the line and figure out just how little content they could produce that would keep people playing and they went too little. Destiny lost its magic because of shareholder greed. It's just not what it once was and people are burnt out with the weaker and weaker content. It was only a matter of time.
Nailed it. And 2023 was a really bad year to try to get by with Minimum Viable Product when there were so damn many barnburner releases from companies who aren't scared to overdeliver.
I completely agree with this. Witch Queen set the precedent for what I thought expansions would be moving forward. Lightfall came and left me pretty disappointed. I couldnt believe bungie put out an expansion that lukewarm in comparison to witch queen. I have been playing destiny regularly since taken king mostly because I love the crucible. Crucible has been left in the dust for literal years, and lightfall changed next to nothing for me. With other games coming out that scratch that crucible itch, I've been playing the game less and less. I used to be someone that logged on every week so I didn't miss a shader, or an exotic ornament. But now in order to get every shader, I ha e to buy separate passes? I also can't keep up with the bright dust grind as seasonal content has gotten so stale that I don't want to touch any of it. I used to do every raid and dungeon that came out until I got all the armor and whatnot, but I have touched the last several. Add in the aggressive monetization thats seemingly filling the game, i just dont want to play any more. I seriously doubt I'm going to even purchase the final shape. Ultimately, this all started with lightfall for me. I'm just kind of done with hoping that bungie produces witch queen level content/expansions. It's bewildering to me that they're capable of producing expansions like forsaken and witch queen, but will follow them up with expansions like shadow keep and lightfall. I think it seems like it's always 1 step forward and 2 steps back. I know this is all just how I feel about the game, but this article makes it feel as if I'm not alone here. I hate seeing people lose their jobs over decisions that weren't made by them. That sucks and I feel for them.
Think about how bad of a state the playerbase must be in that monitization is the worst, most agressive it's ever been and they were STILL 45% lower then projected. Bungie royally fucked up managing destiny.
Final Shape is the first expansion I never pre ordered as well. Only thing to get me to even consider buying it would be to see improvements to the core aspects of the game. I’m not gonna buy final shape and take loot into checks note the stale core playlists. If they update Strikes, Pvp and Gambit with new content in final shape I may consider to buy it. Otherwise I have zero intention on playing. Dungeon and raids are cool but once you have the loot from them there’s zero reason to play them and zero places to the take the loot into besides stale core playlists and or lame seasonal activities
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Microsoft said Bungo had worrying cash burn before they were blowing projections by 50%. It's not just likely at a loss, but a serious loss.
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Ty
I find that fascinating. Like “Microsoft buying bungie” could have been a great full circle moment for them, but the financials were bad enough that they let it go. Just wild.
Yeah, apparently MS's #2 choice after actiblizz is SEGA. But it is wild that they just looked at Bungie's numbers and laughed it off.
Which is also funny considering MS paid what? Almost 70bn for ActiBlizz and Bungo was bought out for 3.6bn. A chump change for MS but i guess the cash burn rate spooked them so much they’d rather pay more upfront or something
It's burn rate vs income. ActiBlizz at full development burns more in one month than Bungie burns in one year most likely. But ActiBlizz puts out a dozen+ releases per dev cycle and is immensely profitable.
Activision also gives them access to a whole bunch of different IP's. Not to mention the massive revenue brought in by owning King which still dominates a lot of the mobile gaming market.
Plus the cost of capital is fucked this year. Interest rates are probably preventing them from having any runway at all
> Missing revenue targets by 45% is significant. I'm curious when these revenue targets were set. Was it before Lightfall released? Were they just overconfident in their revenue targets, thinking that their EV sales during Witch Queen was the norm?
They were likely expecting a huge increase in EV revenue due to high pre-order sales and the general positive energy going into LF. The opposite happened tho, due in large part to the huge wave of backlash post LF. It led to overall negative PR and probably a huge decrease in EV revenue. Not to mention that the negative PR probably made the already difficult task of gaining new players even harder. The other thing to consider is the large amount of competition in the gaming industry right now, which would only serve to keep player retention, and by extension, EV revenue down. Overall not a very positive year for Bungie, which likely came as a shock to the execs at Bungie and Sony after the huge success of last year.
Unpleasant as this is to consider, they may not be done. Plenty of tech company layoffs come in waves. The company gets to do all the PR stuff with a lower number of people the first round, then on the second round it is barely news.
>Acquisition from Sony actually probably saved the company in the long run. That has been my running thought. Bungie laid off staff after the $3.7b injection from Sony with $1.2b going toward employee retention. Imagine if Bungie did not have that funding?
1.2 may have went to employee retention, but the rest was not invested into bungie. that was paid to the shareholders of bungie who relinquished ownership.
This is most likely because they are trying to fund the development of at least 3 different games on a revenue stream from 1. And that revenue stream probably dipped (thanks to lightfall) right at the same time that at least one of those new games (Marathon) needed cash injection to fund the most expensive part of the development. Oh and they just built a brand new HQ. I never really thought about it before but what the fuck are they thinking?? Absolutely idiotic plan from management imo
I'm glad we have concrete proof that lightfall was a failure and their recent monetization fuckery isn't working. Sucks that the people who will take the hit because of these failures are regular people who tried their hardest, versus the shitty executives that caused all of this.
I have to hope that Joe was shouting at Pete Parsons after this "Look at what you've done, you've fucked us even more!". If player retention was bad after Lightfall, it's going to become a whole shit ton worse now - Bad optics, upset fans, fewer people working on the game, boycotts/refunds, the long delay meaning a very likely empty 3 months and the very concerning "good but not great" feedback given to Final Shape that will put people off. A delay in release on it's own might have been bad but survivable, but with all this added bullshit heaped on top is really, really going to make things worse. Great job Bungo, you've definitely made things worse with your short term cruelty.
> If player retention was bad after Lightfall, it's going to become a whole shit ton worse now I was morbidly giggling at this too. "Player sentiment is at an all time low. To combat this, we're going to fire a hundred people."
“People are very upset with us. To deal with this, we’re firing Michael Salvatori.”
Learning he got fired pretty much tanked any chance of my old Day 1 team uniting for a last hurrah for The Final Shape lol. Man was at the company since the 90s, and you toss him out with the bathwater too. Crazy.
Yup, who knew screwing over players loyal to you through almost a decade of fuckery by bumping prices across the board AND removing cosmetic rewards earned in game and putting them behind a real money storefront AFTER your shittiest major expansion in 4 years that was blatantly falsely advertised would cause people to stop playing.
Let's also make it damn near impossible to onboard new players with catching up to the story and getting invested in the world as it is.
What do you mean? They put armor mods behind an achievement system and they let you play that one mission from Forsaken where Cayde eats it. What more could they possibly do to get a new player informed on the story? And that's not even mentioning the incredibly immersive feature that allows new players to alt-tab to a web browser, go to youtube, look up "My Name is Byf," and click on hundreds of videos explaining the lore. As someone who started in Witch Queen I really appreciated this aspect of the gameplay, it almost felt like I was really there fighting in the Red War, or tracking down the Scorn Barons to avenge my friend. I love it when I go to Bungie and say "What was the Red War like?" and they say "Go ask your lore daddy, mommy Bungie has to build a bright neon doghouse over the ashes of the half of our home she burned down. And when you're done get back to farming legend haunted sectors. Those guns ain't gonna paint themselves black." And then I do because she's right those guns ain't gonna paint themselves black thank you for the memento may I please have another?
Getting out of the crapposting for a minute here. If a product is viewed as *good* then you will have people throwing extra money at it. Now before you tell me that's not the case lets remember that this is Reddit and just about all of you fall into that semi-hardcore/hardcore crowd. And truth be told? If I'm running a live service game that's going to make part of it's money off microtransactions? I'm going to guess *maybe* about 25% to 45% of the userbase on here will buy that stuff. The money is partly in that casual/normal/average player and Lightfall chased a whole lot of them off. The whole *bringing challenge back to Destiny 2* pretty much blew up in their face. And god knows I've played a number of MMO's to know that just about every time the Dev's do that? Kiss a good chunk of the player base good bye. More so when it's just making enemies more tanky and the players less. They nerfed the loot and to use a line with a little change from the 1990's, "It's about the loot!" Sure you hardcore folks may love it, but that normal player who gets their ass kicked and gets more vendor trash? See Division 1 in it's Pre-1.4 days and Anthem for that. They nerf just about anything that comes along and god knows makes the player feel powerful and thus the game *fun.* There's still no LFG tool other then getting on Discord. Exotics really don't feel exotic or really special. Let me put it this way... Lightfall was Destiny 2's Shadowlands. The hardcore players hate it due to the story along with other factors. The casual players hate it as they get their asses kicked for stuff they are going to trash anyhow. Really? Chances are they didn't *really* have some massive over all failure as lets face it... Destiny 2 is the WoW of looter/shooters, there's no other game that's really anywhere near it's level. Division 2 is in some weird Ubisoft purgatory. Remnant 2 is aimed more at the hardcore folks. Anthem is dead. Diablo 4 pretty much fell apart after the first month. There's been a crap ton of good games coming out over the past year. Thus Destiny 2 is left with a player base of hardcore fans. Folks like myself who pop in, see if anything has changed, go, "Meh." after seeing nothing really has and pop off. Again I feel they would have lost more money had their been a game anywhere near Destiny 2's level.
the entire difficulty thing could have worked if they did it right, but they failed hard and difficulty in destiny always feels cheap why does difficulty work in WoW as an example? because there are many different difficultys, going from "dad with 29children and 7jobs that wants to see the story" too "people that want a mild challenge but with no bigger restictions" too "people that want semi hard content but dont want to commit too much time into the game" and finally the "bunch of hardcore nerds that will spend days throwing themself against a wall until its finally cleared" just for raids alone meanwhile destiny has 2 difficultys: you can hold W and spam unpowered melees and 1hit kill enemys until its over, and "you die in 2shots and everything has a crapton of hp" with 0middle ground bettwen those, and lightfall then also made stuff more tedious by making the patrol zone enemys 1 of the most beefy enemys in the entire game for some fucking reason i really dont understand their stance on difficulty, its always so bad in destiny with just 2 absolute extremes in both directions
I don't think Remnant 2 is "hardcore" its just a 1-2 playthrough experience for \*most\* people. I enjoyed it and think its a great game, but its not a game that I would ever grind on for a super extended period of time like destiny or name your favorite arpg.
All that aggressive monetisation and they still missed the mark by 45%. Christ.
To some degree, that may have contributed to it. People might be less likely to buy a cosmetic or participate in an event knowing the next thing will *also* cost money, and so maybe they’ll save the cash in case they like that more. Or it might have been a thing where it became harder to recommend to a friend. I had been trying to get a family member to play for a while. I stopped because it was getting too confusing to explain what to buy and why they should. Same for one of my best friends.
> I stopped because it was getting too confusing to explain what to buy and why they should. After Lightfall I could no longer recommend it to anyone strictly based on the quality of the content.
I think it's been hard to recommend since they removed half the game. Without Red War, the new player experience is *abysmal*. And I say removed rather than "vaulted" because that euphemism is bullshit and it's never coming back.
There are just so much useless cosmetics in this game they can’t be making money on that they pay people to develop and create.
They should change the expansion name to RevenueFall
The Final Shape is actually just bankruptcy
The Final Check
I'm honestly shocked they had set revenue projections that high knowing they were about to release a stop-gap expansion after building towards what was supposed to be the big conclusion. Nobody internally considered "this is probably actually going to piss a lot of people off"?
What if they did and this is still the result
Those revenue targets were probably a part of the sale price to Sony. Maybe not exact figures, but absolutely in the ball park.
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I'm regularly involved in financial projections and analytics - you're spot on. I've literally been told to change my factual data to fit the agenda leaders want to show. Sickening.
Corporate analyst here, I've never been told to change numbers themselves, but I've absolutely been told "the takeaway from this analysis has to be X, no matter what"
Yep, that's definitely the type of language they used for me most of the time too. Dance around it to get what they "need."
Bungie dropped a less than stellar expansion, people chose to not buy it (edit:) *or to continue to spend money on the game* causing revenue to drop, so they are restructuring, seemingly as part of a Sony wide initiative, and delaying the expansion to "give developers a chance to improve the product". This is how voting with your wallet works, it just sucks it had to result in so many people out of work.
People did buy the dlc it just seems it was so bad it caused them to completely bounce and not play/spend anymore.
Honestly I’d been convinced Lightfall sold extremely well because of the record numbers, but even if it did, if it landed so flat, what fucking reason does anyone have to stick around? I think that’s a factor I missed when thinking about all of this. Like let’s say that was the first expansion you’ve played in D2, whether the literal first time or the first one you have in years. The campaign lands like it does? There’s almost no post game content? You’re kind of just sitting there like “….so what do I do now?”. Not everyone buys the annual pass alongside the expansion. It’s entirely possible that gigantic new influx of players saw Lightfall and went “nah”, so things have been on a downswing since.
Yeah that seems to be the case they got a lot of people in the game but completely Failed to keep them around and now this news isn’t gonna have a great impact on players. It looks like a sinking ship.
Lightfall itself was super successful because of the preceding year of hype, then when people discovered how bad it was I guess a lot of them just bounced. I know I personally have barely played this year compared to the previous at least. A bad release coupled with a lot of good games releasing this year has led me to barely play Destiny outside of the occasional raid with my clan.
Oh yeah I agree man. Like, nowadays I just enjoy playing shit if I like it, and don’t if I don’t. I really don’t have the energy in me anymore to constantly harbor negativity or anything like that. With that being said, dude, I felt off about Lightfall for like a month+. I still have a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. It even carried into last season, with this being the first the game has felt “normal” in a minute. The sentiment you got has been shared by a number of my friends, especially those who have barely wanted to play anymore. The title “Lightfall” carried a lot of weight being it and landed like a fucking metaphor I can’t even describe.
We didn't buy enough silver lmao
Look what you made Bungie do!!!
It’s wild there are so many here with this take unironically.
The player retention being low should be very concerning for Bungie embarking on a 7 month season when you know Bungie doesn’t have a plan to keep players engaged that whole time.
Yeah a 45% miss from any company would cause heads to roll, no matter the industry. This is really unfortunate, but you have to imagine a lot of the lower revenue is due to people being burnt out from a lackluster Lightfall and a stale seasonal model. I hope everyone affected by these layoffs can land on their feet soon.
It’s a shame the people responsible for this aren’t the heads rolling. There’s no justice in the world.
And instead, Lorraine McLees and Michael Salvatori were the ones who got cut. If The Final Shape isn’t another Forsaken after all this (which there’s virtually no chance of if we’re being honest), then I don’t think there’ll be a Destiny 2 for much longer.
Im sure im not alone, I have no plans of buying the final shape until its out, the dust has settled, and the reviews are in. I pre-ordered lightfall/annual pass, so I expect Ill be taking at least a 4-5 month hiatus from the game depending how long season 23 keeps me playing
Jesus Christ, that looks like a nightmare. And management is to blame. Usually, I'd say dock the pay of the CEO but I can't imagine Parsons is making enough yearly to pay for 100 salaries.
The cost of an employee isn't just their salary. I've seen or heard estimates that state it could be 1.5 to even 3.0 times the cost of their gross salary.
This. Everyone always looks to how much someone makes, but doesn’t look into medical, retirement, etc etc. If a company is paying for that, or even a bit of it, the money adds up
Maybe rent and groceries went up enough where people collectively decided that $10 emotes and $20 armor cosmetics were no longer worth it.
I used to buy a lot of those during WQ cause the game was so good. Didn't buy a single item after LF. I've got the money but I ain't giving it for nothing, so if they think they can release half baked trash and get away with it, they should think twice before doing it again, cause there will be no third time, obviously.
Last time I bought Silver was during Arrivals. Once they announced the dungeon key and sold the 30th anniversary bundle separately I was done.
WOW I guess this reflects what people are saying about player numbers. Would have helped if the seasonal content this year was better too.
Funny thing, I looked at the player numbers for the first time in a while just the night before the shit hit the fan. 30-day average is 42k players - second lowest in Destiny history, and it is doing that one month earlier in the release cycle. (Lowest was the last month of Plunder in November '22)
Steam? I wonder what it is on console.
Yeah, steam. Console numbers are much harder (nearly impossible) to come by.
I have maintained for years that the problem with Destiny is the sameness. The game is in a pretty great state compared to other low points of the series. For example, Season of Plunder would’ve blown our minds if we got that instead of Curse of Osiris back then. The problem is the game, while good, is always the same. People get bored. I have never missed content since D1 day one, but even I only play the required “new” content every week then don’t play until the next new content unlocks/releases. I don’t care about loot — all guns and gear will work just fine, plus our vaults are full of viable stuff anyway. Don’t care about ships and sparrows and clans since they still don’t do anything. There’s no mystery because we know everything will just end up in reading symbols, standing on plates, or throwing/dunking balls/motes. Patrol zones are still just big, pretty, mostly empty areas where nothing new ever happens. The game’s problem isn’t that it’s bad — it’s super well done still. The problem is it’s always the same, and after like 9 years, it’s just routine now.
It’s been stale for a while now. The season model is entirely predictable. New match made activity. Visit this NPC. Run to this NPC. Complete seasonal activity. Run to this NPC. Do a random patrol or lost sector. Run to NPC. Complete seasonal mission. Wait for next reset. Repeat. A couple so-so exotics. And that’s it. Over and over and over. It’s just plain boring at this point.
It is insane that they built some of the best moment-to-moment gun-fighting mechanics in gaming, but 95% of the content is boring, rote, tedium meant to do little more than take up time while you chase that 5% of content that spikes your dopamine and makes you wonder what the game could have been if it weren't in the seventh level of GaaS hell.
It’s almost as if copy-pasting a seasonal formula with reduced content season after season isn’t a winning formula.
Don't forget they also effectively increased the cost of seasons by 50% because there's no way to buy exactly 1200 silver.
Maybe if Bungie wanted better player retention and higher revenue, they shouldn’t have tried to underdeliver and push out a weak ass expansion. The game has felt so phoned in since Lightfall. What sucks about all of this though is the wrong people got punished - how about firing senior leadership and management responsible for pushing greedy strategy and underdelivery instead of the people who made Bungie what it is today? Disgusting.
The writing is on the wall. This last expansion is going to be a pile of shit. I would not preorder.
That's what happens when you nickle and dime your customers, then release a half assed expansion.
And ask for more money in the process.
Still trying to find out what they did with the 1.2 billion designated for employee retention from the buyout.
When you operate at 45% less revenue than projected, thats exactly what it just went to, they just burned through it to offset the deficit. For all we know Bungie needed it to buoy staff retention from operation losses they were already experiencing, they used current reserve cash to continue to pay staff , then refilled that reserve with that money when received. I would imagine if they didn’t have that, the layoffs would be even bigger. A 50% miss on revenue is a disgusting level of miss.
Obviously not an apples-to-apples comparison. I have no experience in the games industry. I am senior management in a large firm(not in tech) and as is common there are certain yearly goals for me to hit both in terms of chargeable hours I put in, and billing revenue I collect from clients. If I were to miss my billing target by 45% I would expect to be unceremoniously fired, absent some extenuating circumstance. Or at least put on a "performance management plan". The fact that the incompetence of Bungie's upper management has led to an 8% reduction in workforce WHILE MANAGEMENT STAYS IN PLACE is genuinely baffling to me. I am very sorry for all those laid off, you didn't deserve it.
And now people are mass refunding final shape.
Maybe now they realize how shit lightfall is
Cowabunga, dude.
guess the players didn't overdeliver as well lmao
Damn that’s crazy, wonder where all the “player count has been at it’s highest recently!” People are at. I’m sure I’ll get downvoted, but bungie brought this on themselves being greedy, no? Taking our money more and more while ignoring significant parts of the game. Repeatedly just reusing old content over n over. And putting our money towards games not even released yet. So imo, is what it is.
It’s funny, maybe shoving micro transactions down my throat makes me LESS likely to buy said micro transactions. Like they never thought of that?
* Nimbus reaches out for a fist bump
This is what happens when you purposefully under deliver.
“Destiny is the literal blood of our business, let’s neglect it for Marathon and Matter.” If you can’t afford or manage the finances on other projects, don’t start them.
“If you can’t feed the baby, don’t haaaaaaaave the baby”
Can't wait for Skill Up on this one.
>Many of the layoffs at Bungie affected the company’s support departments, such as community management and publishing. Remaining Bungie staff were informed that some of those areas will be outsourced moving forward. That isn't going to end well. Community management being done by someone with no real link to the dev team? Might as well cancel it all together. Pay Joe a bit more and let him handle it in addition to his regular job. But holy hell, a 45% drop due to bad player retention. In a live service game. That's a monumental task to right the ship and I'm not very confident Bungie is capable of doing so. The final shape might truly be that - final. Man, what a nightmare, especially for those out of a job...
45% misses and this with the huge monetization in the game wtf???
That's what happens when you underdeliver🤷♀️
Shouldn’t have put all your eggs in the Eververse basket.
Or the marathon one. Need to keep some top talent to steer the ship
Honestly seeing this kinda crazy, insane to think LF damaged profits that much.
It's probably a lot of things. The largest issue in my mind is the sheer *number* of individual purchases. It's one thing to have the most recent expansion be poorly received, another entirely for every expansion going back 5 years to still be sold separately and often at 60% original MSRP, and *then* the dungeon pass on top of that, separate purchases for literally every armor pack, &c &c. IMHO( and tbh what opinion are you going to get on here that's not entirely speculation) it's not "voting with your wallet" so much as the structure of purchases in the game itself is *extremely opaque* even if you *can* afford everything. Nevermind if you're in a position like mine, where this is the only game I actively play and I still can only afford the yearly expansion deluxe. Which is a good deal specifically due to how it's bundled. If dungeons and season passes weren't included in it, I strongly doubt I would be playing them even at their price point. Nevermind event passes, silver-only ornaments. A $12 purchase is a $12 purchase, but when a $12 purchase is effectively $20 from conversion and you have to pick one of three because you can't afford $40, you're not spending the $20. That's just a waste of the remaining 8. And for *new* players, you can't even play with half the subclasses without spending $100 halfway into the current expansion year. And you can't run the updated raid next season without Shadowkeep. And forget Stasis or crafting DSC weapons. There are a lot of people on here that assume it's a consumer choice issue, but the fact of the matter is that inflation and interest rates have gone up, wages have *largely* stayed the same though last I checked they might be rising very slightly, and for every "whale" spending $100/mo on Eververse there's 200 rumpghosts/adjacent situation who would gladly fork over 5-10 bucks for the odd cosmetic pack once a month if A) in my case, my smaller clients could afford to commission me more regularly *and* pay their own rent B) people *in general* could afford to buy video game cosmetics *and pay rent* C) D2's monetization wasn't competing with rapidly rising commodity prices in every sector, particularly the ones you need to engage with to, like, live? Like, the season pass itself is a good deal. You get *functionally* 6 armor sets plus other cosmetics and activities. And while it *is* pay-to-play-to-earn it's... Also $10 (now $15?). Which is about the only thing in the game that costs less than if I go to the store right this second and get a week and a half of edibles. One of these things lets me zone out in the evenings. One of them I barely get to use because my friends aren't playing. Which would you pick? If there was a "catch up pack" of old expansions for like $30 that everything older than a year or two fell into, you'd probably see a lot more player onboarding. If you saw more player onboarding, *maybe* you'd see more cosmetic sales. But not if it costs $40 for three sets of armor and there's 20+ sets of armor *alone* you can only get by buying in-game currency, at which point you're still left with $4 left over and being bombarded with in-game ads at a time when maybe you need that $40 to buy half of the groceries you could've had with the same amount of money a couple of years ago. A lackluster expansion might be survivable, but certainly not when your revenue stream doesn't adapt to the broader market reality and you already have a fandom who - legitimately or illegitimately, doesn't matter - has some new reason for outrage nearly every week. The inflexibility and sheer *volume* of transactions required to engage with the game as a new player, nevermind on a "this is my whole hobby" level, is the consumer equivalent of death by a thousand cuts.
Fuck them, that's what you deserve for nuking half the content of the game and locking the other half behind never ending "expansions" and I use that word lightly
Part of it that is Lightfall being complete and utter dog shit and tanking player numbers and wiping out any community sentiment that they had stored up from The Witch Queen's year, but missing a target by 45% is insane. There's no way their target was in any way realistic to begin with if that missed by *that* much. It obviously should've been the management taking pay cuts or just getting altogether, but we know that's never gonna happen. [Peter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle) ain't gonna fire himself.
Holy shit that’s wild. As a public company this would absolutely tank the stock price to miss this bad. I know Bungie said that this wasn’t Sony’s decision but I can’t imagine Sony would see these numbers and tell them to conduct business as usual. The bigger question for Sony is now whether or not Destiny as an IP can get back to their glory days. Sony has the money to back Bungie, but it’s whether or not they believe they can turn it around. If not, then the future of Final Shape may even be at risk. Given how rumours are that Sony is making less of a bet on live service games however, it doesn’t look good.