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Bungie CEO Claims Layoffs Were Due to Destiny 2 Underperformance - IGN

https://www.ign.com/articles/pete-parsons-tells-employees-bungie-kept-the-right-people-to-work-on-destiny-2

In an internal town hall meeting addressing a Monday round of layoffs that impacted multiple departments, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons allegedly told remaining employees that the company had kept “the right people” to continue work on Destiny 2.

Bungie CEO Claims Layoffs Were Due to Destiny 2 Underperformance - IGN

47 comments

bungle_in_the_jungle

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Man, how about you rather try to not make the game an insufferable grind fest. I love the gameplay so much, but each time I decide to log back in and give it another go it doesn't take long before that fun layer is peeled back and I see the grind lurking underneath.

echo64

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the grind keeps attach rate though, it's no good for them if you log in, have fun, do the stuff and log out again for six months

this is what all these GaaS are based around, I gotta grind this magical stick, I gotta grind Diamond, I gotta grind this battlepass or I'm losing money!

probablyaCat

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Honestly if I could play all of the game without having to grind like a fucking mad man, I'd probably regularly buy expansions and pay for a season pass.

I love the coop. I love the gunplay. I love most of the game except the grind.But I have kids and real life shit to do. I tried getting back into it during witch queen, but the amount of time I had to spend daily on it made it damn near impossible to play the dungeons and stuff. I had a little extra free time when I did that too. By the time I managed to hit the cap, I realized I was not having any fun doing it. So I quit. Had a clan I liked chatting and playing with. It was cool. But I'm just not going to keep paying for and playing a game that just feels like a tedious as fuck job.

echo64

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sure, so here's the reality check.

you aren't profitable to these GaaS companies, you have kids and real life shit to do. you aren't gonna bring them in money.

The people bringing in the money do the grind. it's what all these GaaS games are. I too would enjoy if these studios made traditional games that are made to be enjoyable rather than made to keep attach rates up. but that's not what they set out to make.

probablyaCat

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I mean I was purchasing the expansions and the season pass. And on games that I feel I'll stick with for a while I even get some cosmetic stuff at times.

I doubt it is even a matter of them measuring the profit. I imagine that a lot of it is they (and many other gaas games that aren't pay to win) are trying to be the only game a person plays. To make them feel devoted to it. Like they would have wasted so much of they give up (sunk cost fallacy) and that by switching games they'll get behind in their main game. Because of they aren't profitable with a repeatedly paid game and season pass off of a person then they have some real bad management. In fact, me paying for a season pass and the expansions and using the server less should make me more profitable than most players except for the whales that buy all the cosmetics too. Especially when Fortnite and Warframe are f2p and profitable.

echo64

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except for the whales that buy all the cosmetics too. Especially when Fortnite and Warframe are f2p and profitable.

🔔 🔔 🔔

people paying for the cosmetics, and the battlepasses are the profit generators for GaaS games. Destiny just keeps their expansion setup because it's even more extra money

think about it. Fortnite is free to play, and it's funded epic games basically singlehandedly since, all the aquasitions, unreal engine, their store. it's all fortnite money, it's all battlepass and microtransactions

c0mbatbag3l

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That's because they're only making games for the whales who grew up thinking they have to be constantly unlocking a battle pass to have fun.

The game used to just be fun.

Now we only gave the indies making new ideas.

echo64

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Fun fact this isn't true! You can play games outside of gaas without relying only on indies.

I'm playing alan wake 2, and it's fantastic and full of new ideas. Are you?

wccrawford

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I hate grind, but I used to enjoy just playing D2 weekly, way beyond the weekly content.

Then they decided that literally everything needed to be a slog, and that being overpowered was bad, and they ruined my fun. I went from 80 hr weeks (I know this isn't healthy) to 1 hour weeks over the course of a couple seasons. I still spent a lot of time after the launch of the latest DLC, but after that was done, and they upped the base difficulty by removing the effect of levels on almost all base content, I struggled to stay engaged. This season, I just gave up. I've got like 15 levels, when I usually have 200-300 in the battle pass.

I'm not saying they don't have a grind problem, too, but it wasn't what killed it for me.

Conyak

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It’s fucking ridiculous that CEO’s make decisions that make players dislike a game or product yet the workers are the ones getting laid off. I doubt any of the regular employees had a say in the shitty DLC decisions.

Carighan

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Now I will say that a game company maybe doesn't need 1100 employees. That's just intuitively oversized, at least to me.

That being said, I cannot imagine a substantial amount of money, that could trivially uphold those jobs, is being wasted on middle management positions which will not be part of these layoffs (of course, they never are), bonuses and C-suite yachts. Plus, the company had no game release sind 2017, maybe not performing too well financially is, well, expected? That is, certainly the wise CEO put significant sums of money from the highly successful early years of Destiny 2 aside to easily cushion the leaner years later instead of blowing it all on cocaine and hookers, right? Otherwise, why would someone keep that management around that cannot even do something as simple as cushioning money? Right? 😑

I hate how this never affects the people who are actually responsible for the losses. You never get the C's sued to take the bonuses back they got blown up their arses. You never get all the excessive layers of middle management removed. No, they always let go of the actual workers, who could do fuck all to prevent it to begin with.

BURN

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Destiny 2 has overperformed for years. If they couldn’t see the playerbase getting less happy with paying ridiculous sums for seasonal DLC I don’t know what to tell them. Everyone who’s even casually played could have told you this.

D2 has made most of the money it’s going to at this point. There are no new players.

Mr_Buscemi

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I can't imagine new players playing the game. I tried getting back in after missing most of the events since the 2nd dlc came out. So much of the story is gone now because they were only part of the event and inaccessible now. Doesn't even feel like the same game when I went back to it. Tried watching a 2 hour lore video for all the things that happene but that didn't help.

verysoft

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Some of the fanbase finally started to realise they were just being milked.

Dark_Arc

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There are new players... We just brought another on last month... It's really not that bad. The new light stuff has actually been worked into a pretty nice onboarding experience.

BURN

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There’s a couple here and there, it’s not like new players have completely stopped joining, but there’s not that many. I’d guess fractions of a percent of the playerbase have started in the last year.

The new light onboarding really was abysmal when I went through it earlier this year (few months before light fall) and the only reason I made it as far as I did was my brother who has thousands of hours in the game. If it was just me I wouldn’t have made it more than a few hours in before being overwhelmed with too much

Dark_Arc

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There’s a couple here and there, it’s not like new players have completely stopped joining, but there’s not that many.

That's typical when you hit market saturation/have an established game. Look at wow or RuneScape. The revenue comes from the people already playing your game.

The new light onboarding really was abysmal when I went through it earlier this year

You should've seen it before beyond light launched.

"Go shoot that, now that, now that. I'm so glad you're back guardian. Welcome to the tower."

My friends and I started without anyone to pull us through that mess, and we figured out what to do with Google and just clicking on things. We've since grown to a group of like 10ish, but yeah ... Like newer people don't really get what it was like before. It's not great, but it's gotten better.

hubobes

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The CEO has to go because they failed to deliver? Right? I mean that’s why they get paid so much, to take responsibility. Now they will face the consequences of their failure! No?

Kyrgizion

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In their defense, Destiny 2 did morph into a vast turd over its lifetime. Terrible story, terrible characters, repetitive gameplay, zero innovation. Gog is full of 15$ games with much more to offer than Destiny 2 ever had. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

verysoft

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I think they had the ideas guy in once every couple years and then they just reused the shit of the mechanic he came up with at that time.

SCmSTR

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STOP MAKING SHITTY GAMES

Enshittification.

dinckelman

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I hate that they make it sound, as if it's an impossible issue to solve. It's underperforming because new people can't figure out what to do in the game, and veterans cannot find enough things to do. You can only play crucible for so long.

They clearly have the artists and the engineers to do this, but they put all of that effort into new cash shop skins, rather than game content

GoodEye8

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It doesn't help that the game tries to squeeze every penny from anyone playing the game.

Smoogs

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a lot of the end game content isn’t playable unless you have a guild that constantly grinds for it. And by guilds: these are guilds that are like 5 yrs old and you’re expecting these players to still want to hang around be content with grinding to bring in the newbies to the fold. Good luck with trying to find someone who is willing to teach as their interest wanes. Bungie tried enticing older guilds to teach new players with player banners to do guided runs. But that was a fail. No one has that kind of time on their hands.

Those dungeons are some of the most complicated ridiculous things I’ve ever had the displeasure of researching. Like just watching the YouTube tutorials on kings fall and how they had to speed it up and get nausea while they try to tell you all the keyhole attempts just to open the dungeon was enough for me to nope the fuck off from ever doing raids or dungeons.

And just doing companion apps to try to learn the dungeons was a fail.

games are supposed to be what you do for fun. It’s nothing but stress if one player, just one: fucks up, your whole team is wiped and you just lost the last hour or even two of play. Down the drain. You are just left with despair and hatred for your entire fireteam.

That is how it’s designed without apology.

They actually have players SAVING dungeon points on the companion app. That should tell you all you need to know about how unplayable that EGC actually is.

alienanimals

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Layoffs were actually due to inept leadership.

MrHandyMan

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I always found it kinda sad that Destiny has a lot of lore, but if you are a new player / returning player you can't experience the lore that you have missed because it's just removed from the game.

Crystal_Shards64

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I stopped playing when the first dlc dropped. Honestly if they stuck with their original vision of destiny and kept the first game going I would have probably stuck with it.

I miss the halo era of bungie. Bring that bungie back lol

Phegan

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The last thing workers want to hear is "the right people" when they see their friends and colleagues laid off. I was at a company that said that after a round of layoffs, the CEO got absolutely roasted for saying it.

p03locke

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Destiny 2 came out in 2017. Maybe make a new game, instead of trying to leech off of the old one for 6 years?

False

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You can't even play the game from 2017 anymore

kilodelta

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Bungie milked their audience with a hard drive occupying piece of shit. The design of Neomuna was crap. The characters were crap. The story was awful. The level design was amateurish at best.

It makes me mad that I have an addictive itch that needs scratching.

Phegan

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Then stop pushing the player base away with predatory profiteering tactics.

This is on leadership, not the workers. It's a shame they have to suffer for the mistakes of a profit greedy leadership team.

HawlSera

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Stop selling overpriced expansions that never go on sale with a new one coming every week.

Cmon at least Sims 4 does bundles and shit

Ignifazius

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It was on sale 2 weeks ago, 60% off.

Dark_Arc

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Despite what others are saying, the game is fine (at least compared to its previous state/status)... They've made a lot of changes to improve the onboarding experience and remove pain points. They've made things less grindy and more engaging every expansion.

The last DLC just had kind of a meh story to it, "the discovery of strand." The environment they used also wasn't all that pretty or interesting. It wasn't snow, it wasn't a swamp, it was a minimalistic city-scape with some canyons.

That, plus increased pricing and over dramatization of the loss of the red war and foresaken content (which wasn't even that good compared to the new stuff mind you -- it was extremely short and grindy) has almost definitely caused the profit loss.

Not to mention, playlist activities still feel bland... Implement map voting and modifier voting, and make a higher difficulty playlist for PvE content. I swear once you're caught up, it's either stomp over everything in the same 5 maps over and over, or face the exact same somewhat challenging (or extremely challenging) encounter over and over for an entire week. They have all this content they could open up to high end rewards and mutators, but they don't.

GoodEye8

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If the game was fine it wouldn't be 45% below their revenue projections.

beefcat

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plenty of good games fail to meet revenue projections

GoodEye8

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Except Bungie isn't creating a new game here, they're continuing a game they've been supporting for years. They have years of metrics and they should have a pretty good understanding how much revenue to expect. Even if they were overly optimistic and set an unrealistic projection it doesn't explain missing it by 45%.

beefcat

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I can't really comment on the current quality of the game in 2023, since I noped out about 4 years ago, but there are any number of explanations.

Lack of new content. I haven't seen the game discussed much in the gaming press, which means there probably haven't been any notable content drops for a while. It sounds like the game's next expansion has been delayed, and the game is being maintained by a skeleton crew while the rest of the studio focuses on Marathon.
Competition. With few exceptions, good games always slowly bleed users as shiny new alternatives attract players. This is compounded if you're running a live service game and have a long content drought.

My point isn't "Destiny good", I don't really know that. My point is that we can't really draw conclusions about the quality of the game based solely on missed revenue targets.

GoodEye8

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I agree that you can't draw conclusions about the quality of the game simply by the fact that it missed the revenue target. But I'm not drawing the conclusion based on the fact that it missed the target but rather based on by how much the target was missed. If they missed by 15% then sure, it's not an indication because maybe they really did overestimate their target. But 45%? You don't miss by that much when you have yearly revenue numbers showing you the trend. My point is that such a severe miss in this case does end up being indicative of the quality because the explanations, even yours, will end up being negative about the game.

Dark_Arc

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It sounds like the game's next expansion has been delayed, and the game is being maintained by a skeleton crew while the rest of the studio focuses on Marathon.

FWIW, they have ~650 people even after the layoffs for destiny 2 alone. Hardly a skeleton crew. The content drops have been the same as they've been for years, seasonal content drops in-between expansions. There is definitely a lul period where there's not new stuff getting released to give people a chance to catch up.

Competition. With few exceptions, good games always slowly bleed users as shiny new alternatives attract players.

There is some of this. I think there also just seems to be a general recoil of players at what games are costing these days. I'm personally fine with it, but I see what feels like infinite complaining about how greedy ... basically every company that isn't indie is being.

Realistically, I'd say it's A) bad PR and B) a failure to make new gameplay loops that shake things up significantly C) a failure to fully utilize old content (there's not a lot of reason to play old strikes, not a lot to encourage players to help others out in old story missions, etc -- replay value is artificially neutered by making too many things curated which limits choice)

beefcat

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I think there also just seems to be a general recoil of players at what games are costing these days. I'm personally fine with it, but I see what feels like infinite complaining about how greedy ... basically every company that isn't indie is being.

I think this is mostly just the fact that the people who spend the most time on social media are also basically kids with very little spending money. None of my millennial peers even blinked when AAA game prices went up to $70 with the new console generation. We have fairly mature careers and have paid off our student debt by now.

Dark_Arc

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Maybe, but we're also seeing it in reviews in such high quantities, it feels like it has to be more than just kids. And like, sure I'd love if the games were cheaper, but they certainly haven't gotten cheaper or less risky to make.

It's frustrating either way... I don't care if the game is $100. I want to know A) does it have pay to win mechanics or gambling (things I actually consider to be predatory -- another word that is significantly over used right now), B) is it fun?, and C) how much replay value is it (i.e. should my expectations be set for a really great 80 hours or potentially hundreds -- I'm okay with the former sometimes, but it's nice to know what I'm getting into).

Lately with steam reviews it's like "tHiS gAMe coSt toO muCh. Y u So gReDy!?!" Which tells me none of those things and just gives me old man yelling at a cloud energy about how things (particularly live service stuff) does cost money to develop and run beyond a 1 time purchase of $25.

Maybe you can relate ... Maybe not ...

108

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What’s new this season? Another grind fest and a mission you have to run hundreds of times, just like last season? Man it never gets old does it?

MilitantAtheist

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I'm that case, just wait until Marathon fails epicly.

KingThrillgore

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So it sounds like the developers had a better bead on why D2 has been losing numbers and there's no way for them to provide feedback. And as a result, they were probably tied into the layoffs. Talk about some obvious mismanagement. The wrong person was laid off.