Basically Bungie was an independent company that used to primarily make games for Macintosh computers. In the early 2000s they showcased their next game "Halo" which was also to be on Macs. However, Microsoft saw potential in Halo and bought Bungie out and had them develop Halo for the Xbox. Fast forward to 2007, Bungie and MS came to a deal where Bungie would become its own independent company again on the condition two more Halo games were made. (MS retained he rights to Halo as well.) Since 2004 Bungie had been making plans for Destiny, it was something they wanted to do once done with Halo. I [i]believe[/i] that they decided to team up with Activision since they needed the money to fund Destiny and make it into what they wanted it to be. From there my knowledge of the subject is rather dicey. Many people blame the shape of Destiny on Activision interfering. In a way, the deal kind of sounds like a no brainer. Two developers/publishers who pioneered the FPS genre on consoles teaming up sounds great; it's a win-win since people love CoD and Halo. Activision was also Bungie's ticket to reaching the PlayStation crowd after having been developing games solely for the Xbox for ten years (even though the original contract did call for Destiny to be a 360 exclusive.) Obviously, things never go as planned. It is natural and unavoidable for things to be cut in the development process of games. With Destiny, however, something most certainly had to have been going on behind the scenes that we may never know about (or will in ten years or so.) In my opinion there was probably a lot of knocking of heads; each team probably wanted something different and Activision - being the one with the money - typically came out on top in these arguments.

Basically (from what I understand), bungie broke off from Microsoft because they wanted to focus on making other things that weren't halo. So when they broke off they still needed the people to fund their games. That's where Activision came in and said "I'll give you some funds but the game is advertised and sold how I want it to be advertised and sold". That's what most publishers do. (Hence people bitch that activision was the one who decided to cut out content to sell it later). There are also cases where the publisher wants to keep making a game and the actual company making the game doesn't. In this case the company sells it to the publisher and the publisher gets another gaming company to produce it. Hence what happened with halo.

I think basically bungie was broke or some shit and activision played grandma and paid for her broke ass grandson