Recently, Bungie and Activision announced they are parting ways and that Bungie was retaining all ownership rights to Destiny. A lot of people are understandably happy about this, but a few people are skeptical that Bungie won’t pull other underhanded practices like they displayed in 2018.
I’ll be honest – it is conceivably possible that they might, but I don’t think they will pull anything as bad as they had. I think people are underestimating the amount of control Activision had, or on just how much more free Bungie is now. Just look to the differing responses to Destiny 2’s 2018 performance. Activision stated they were disappointed that it hadn’t hit their sales expectations, while Bungie made it clear they were very happy and proud of the game’s reception. Bungie’s sales expectations are clearly lower than those of Activision.
Why? Because Bungie is really only focused on making a damn good game, on making enough money to pay their employees to keep working on the game they love, and pay the needed bills enough to keep the lights on so they can keep working. Activision, on the other hand, is focused on making insanely high amounts of shareholder profits beyond what any sane person and corporation should make, to hell with how they get that money or how it affects gamers and consumers. There is no way both companies are using the same end goal numbers for their measuring sticks of success; Bungie’s financial goals are of course gonna be much lower than Activision’s overall, even with how distribution and promotion are now going to be under Bungie’s control too. The whole debacle with the XP throttling was clearly done to push players into microtransactions – Activision’s MO. Plus, now Bungie isn’t shackled and enslaved into being forced to develop whole new huge expansions every year like clockwork, which means they can spread out those more and focus more time and resources to fixes, endgame content, and fun seasonal events.
The people at Bungie are human, and when they were pushed harshly into a corner by Activision to do whatever it took to get players buying more engrams, they buckled and made a shitty choice. More than once. I see Forsaken as their attempt at an apology to their fans and playerbase. To be brutally honest, I can’t imagine what kind of pressure and assault the Bungie teams were under or for how long that had caused them to make those shitty choices; but I sincerely believe that the guys at Bungie’s helm went through 2018 the same way a person goes through a year of an abusive and manipulative romance with someone forcing them to do things they don’t want to do before finally having enough and saying, “No. This is wrong; I don’t want to be this person. We’re done.” I have faith in Bungie to rise above this and to make Destiny 2 (and eventually Destiny 3) into the better game they dreamed of at the start and we fans always knew it could be, despite the growing pains and learning process I have no doubt they will go through in 2019. Growth is hard, getting away from toxic people (and corporations) and behaviors is hard. But what comes out of that growth is always so much better. This is your time, Bungie; grow, stumble, and fly like we know you can.
Please don’t fuck it up, Bungie.
The Gameplay Mechanic 