It hasn’t been a good week at Bungie or a good week to be a Destiny 2 fan. On Monday roughly 100 staff we let go and The Final Shape has been delayed. Since Monday there has been a steady trickle of bad news, so today I want to get you caught up on the latest going on at Bungie, and what this means for the future of Destiny 2.
Destiny 2 is on the ropes right now. Ask any Destiny 2 player, and they will tell you it’s been like this for some time. Lightfall wasn’t good, and the following seasons haven’t been up to standard, with the exception of the current Season of the Witch. 2023 is hyper competitve for gaming with hit after hit releasing seemingly every week. Just in the past 2 weeks we’ve had Alan Wake 2, Super Mario Bros Wonder and Spider-man 2… All Game of the Year candidates.
Destiny 2’s popularity is on the wane. According to a report from Jason Schreier at Bloomberg, revenue is down 45% against projections for the year, and Bungie informed their staff of this 2 weeks ago. Then came the layoffs. Bungie’s CEO Pete Parsons put the poor performance down to poor player rentention following a lacklustre major expansion in Lightfall, and less than expected pre-orders for The Final Shape, the upcoming DLC, which is also the final expansion of the light vs darkness saga.
Internally, The Final Shape has been getting “good” feedback, not “great feedback”. We haven’t heard offcially from Bungie yet regarding the delay, but I would imagine we’re going to hear this week in their This Week In Destiny update, if indeed that is still going to be published given much of the social team was let go.
Pete Parsons informed staff they would be cutting costs for travel, implementing salary caps and hiring freezes. Almost immediately after the news broke the open positions went from 70 to 30 on Bungie’s website. On Monday morning up to 100 members of staff had a mysterious 15 minute meeting put into their calendars, and during that meeting they were let go. This included many members of the community management team, player support, legal, HR, art, writing, and audio. It appeard as if developers weren’t hit quite as hard, although the QA team was hit hard with layoffs.
During the town hall meeting on Monday where staff were informed of the layoffs, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons allegedly told staff they would be “Keeping the right people” to continue to work on Destiny 2. Bungie have taken responsibility for the layoffs, when initially we thought it might have more to do with Sony rather than Bungie. However, Parsons informed Bungie staff the layoffs were largely due to the underperformance of Lightfall, plus lower-than-expected preorders of The Final Shape.
Bungie staff were told player sentiment is at an all time low, which had been flagged to leadership in the months leading up to the layoffs. Staff wanted to turn things around and work on features to bring back Destiny 2 fans. The layoffs are in stark contrast to the reassurance they got when the Sony takeover happend, where Bungie specifically stated there would be no redundencies with $1.2 billion reserved for employee retention. However, it appeard as if the under performance of Lightfall has a considerably negative effect on players, and now Bungie itself.
Destiny 2’s popularity has been on the deline all year since the release of Lightfall. I can see that in interest in Destiny 2 videos, you can all see that on Google Trends, the decline in interest is much more pronounced than in previous years. Lightfall was a disaster, and the Destiny 2 player base knew it almost immediately after it came out. This was supposed to be the Avenger’s Infinity War moment, we’d lose big-time, which would set up a thrilling finale in The Final Shape. But what we got was a lacklustre, incoherent story with characters we weren’t invested in.
PVP has been on the decline for a good while. Many big name players left during Beyond Light when Stasis took over the crucible and made it much less fun to play, and since then we’ve edged towards an ability heavy PVP sandbox leading to many more big name players leaving in droves.
Given all of this is shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that revenue is 45% down. 2023 is not a good year to have a lacklustre player experience given the quality of the games this year including Tears of the Kingdom, Resident Evil 4, Baldur’s Gate 3, Mario Wonder, Alan Wake 2, Spiderman 2, Armoured Core 6 just to name a few. Competition for eyeballs and spare time is very high, and Destiny 2 fans are feeling the fatigue, and if the player experience isn’t up to the highest possible standard, then they are playing other games.
But what does this mean for the future of Destiny 2? While I think this is bad news this week, for Bungie staff, for players, for everybody, I don’t think Destiny 2 is going anywhere. While The Final Shape is going to be delayed by a few months, I still think Bungie can deliver a great Final Shape expansion, and I can only hope that an extra few months worth of development will turn it from “good” to “great”.
As for the future of Destiny 2, now, I am not so sure. If you had asked me about the future of Destiny 2 last week, I would have said it’s going to move into the episodes structure post Final Shape, and then we’re likely to see another expansion in 2025. Now, I am not too sure. I think the happy path from this point in time is Bungie make good on their promises to make The Final Shape the best expansion it can be, then focus development on the 3 announced episodes, working towards a new expansion in 2025. But given their split focus with Destiny 2, Marathon, the game code-named Gummie Bears, I’m not as confident as I once was.
Let me know what you think in the comments, and keep an eye on Bungie tomorrow and what they say in This Week In Destiny, if anything it’s going to be interesting.