According to reports, bad management was the final nail in the coffin for Destiny 2.
As announced by Bungie in May, Destiny 2 is in the final stages of a live service game’s lifecycle. While the servers will stay up (for who knows how long), no new content will be released and a whole slew of layoffs hit the developers that kept the game running and relevant for almost nine years.
The first question most fans had immediately, after all this time of running Destiny successfully as a major IP for Bungie, is why?
Profit problems with Bungie
Through an anonymous source with “knowledge of the situation”, recent reporting by Forbes has revealed that the true reason Destiny 2 is coming to an end is plain, old fashioned bad management. The report sums it up in two major points related to the profitability of the games.
First had to do with how much content had to be constantly churned out to keep players on board in a crowed live service market, as “because of the enormous scale of content that had to be produced nonstop, lest fans revolt against its scarcity, Destiny was only very rarely profitable during its entire lifespan”.
The second reason had to do with simple resource mismanagement, as “when Destiny was profitable, those extra funds were often immediately misused by leadership at the time, funneled into way too many simultaneous incubation projects or ideas like spending tens of millions on a new, unneeded 208,000 square foot headquarters”.
Marathon might struggle with the same issues
It seems that when Destiny 2 was performing well, profits weren’t reinvested in the game but rather used to fund side projects that never got off the ground. The only exception to that is Marathon, a mammoth game that’s struggling to cultivate a player base even after entering its second season (something the $40 price tag might have something to do with).
The issues that plagued Destiny 2 have been passed down to Marathon, and with fewer devs to support the game and a dwindling player count, it seems like something of a bad omen considering that it’s the one game Bungie seems to have placed all its chips on with no Destiny 3 coming in the future.
