A Reddit post by user idontcareaboutmyun11. [quote] If you want a sneak peek as to what happens behind the doors of a software company, keep reading. I am the Director of Finance for a major software company (valued well into the 9-figure range) who also happens to enjoy a measly 0.88 k/d average in the crucible on the side. I'm no more invested other than I just play to relax occasionally along with my brother who lives out of state so that he and I can stay in touch. But like many of you, I have high hopes for what Destiny could be. And with all the repeated front page posts arguing that Bungie isn't listening to the changes its player base is demanding, I figured you guys would want to know how that process typically works. My work position grants me the privilege to be in many meetings surrounding strategy and decision-making. I also see behind the curtain quite a bit as I also oversee the department who forecasts our future growth based on current trends, inputs, and variances. If Bungie is similar to my company, here's what happens when you guys speak out here on Reddit and elsewhere: 1) Deej and Cosmo read your messages daily and take many of them to heart. Our PR team does the same here. When he says he's listening, it's true. But that's only part of the process. 2) Either daily or, most likely, weekly, Deej will be present in a meeting with numerous CXOs, VPs (executive team), heads of development, product managers, business analysts, and several other department leaders. 3) At some point during this meeting Deej gets a chance to say, "Hey guys, the community really likes A and B, they absolutely despise C, they're frustrated that we changed D and want it back to the way it was, and they also proposed we add a completely new E to the game." Almost everything you guys communicate here definitely gets passed along to the higher ups. 4) Each of those A-E decisions is discussed either on the spot or later in a dedicated product council meeting if it requires more time or research. 5) Meanwhile, several teams of analysts go to work figuring out the impact said changes would have and feed the result up to their CXO or VP. The market analysts will try to vet if the claims are true and what competitors are doing. The financial analysts are creating pro formas to determine if said changes are cost-effective and ensure all changes actually pay for themselves. Operations (or a similar division) will look at player attrition metrics and NPS/CSat (or similar) surveys to see if recent changes have reduced playing hours (remember the email some of you got asking why you stopped playing Destiny? - that's this team in action). ^ That last step is the really important one. Often times I see people asking for trivial changes to be made such as "Bungo, for the tenth time, can I organize my vault please??"... let me illustrate exactly how this conversation would go at my company (literally modeled off a meeting I was in last week): ... PR Team (aka Deej): The community is asking for us to add vault sorting capabilities. CEO: Ok... Mr. CTO, how hard would that be to implement? CTO: Well, the original code wasn't written that way so it would be much more than a 5-minute patch job as our code doesn't have the ability to remember its stored position in our database, and we'd have to write in some completely new variable hooks as well. CEO: How hard would it be to add? CTO: It may seem like a simple thing to the person asking for it, but it's actually a pretty significant change in our SQL backend, the game's main code, and we'd need to pull in a GUI designer or two to make the toggles visible to the user who are currently already hard at work creating thousands of different armor images so that shaders change exotics in Destiny 2. I would have to pull all of them off of what they're doing for a while, then since we're messing with the literal database of players' stored items, we'd need a while to thoroughly test it to make sure we inadvertently don't blow away everyone's gear. Gonna take a significant amount of time. CEO: Speak plainly. CTO: I'm saying you can either have a better game in Destiny 2, or I can pull a dozen guys off that project for up to a month to work on something that, quite frankly, is far less material than what they're already working on. We're already working double overtime as it is to make Destiny 2 everything that the community wanted Destiny 1 to be. We already delayed Destiny 2 a full quarter, do you honestly want me to pull people off that to work on something so trivial and non-vital and potentially push it back even further? CEO: Understood. My CFO, what are your thoughts? CFO: My analysts tell me a dozen developers with their salaries plus benefits and taxes pulled for a month to work on that would cost about 100k which we will literally get no return on. 2 major investment banks have already downgraded Activision's stock last year and if we don't hit a 2.0 EPS by the end of next year, heads are going to roll just like Harold Ryan's. Are you really considering risking the Destiny 2 delivery deadline by pulling people off it to work on vault sorting? I get why players want it, but I don't think they realize there is both a monetary and opportunity cost every time they ask us to do something. CEO: Ops, what are your player metrics telling you? COO: We show that, while the vocal minority has complained a lot more lately, players keep playing the game and attrition is minimal. It doesn't seem that lack of vault sorting is causing players to stop playing. SalesOps: If I may jump in here, our KPIs suggest that ignoring this vault sorting request does not seem to indicate that it will in any way impact our projected sales of Destiny 2. While the players may be whining about it, we still expect them to spend their money on Destiny 2. CEO: So basically you guys are telling me that doing vault sorting right now costs us money, causes lost dev productivity, takes a whole team of people up to a month of work, potentially threatens our Destiny 2 delivery date, and would be done for literally no financial gain or loss at all? I'm sorry, PR Team, we will not proceed with said request at this time. Perhaps later when we have less things on our plate. [later] Reddit front page: We've been asking for vault sorting for months now? Bungie, why haven't you done it yet? Why aren't you listening?!? ... TL;DR: Please don't harp on the semantics above as I fully understand that the above is a super simplistic scenario that ignores other variables. My point, rather, is to show that there are entire teams who research player/game/market/financial metrics, KPIs, and feedback and then high-level discussions occur in which the data is discussed and a decision is made. If Bungie hasn't yet implemented a decision you've been wanting them to make, there are teams of analysts, scores of player data, NPS/CSat surveys, and many other sets of data that have gone into Bungie's decision. PS - I will say that, while customer complaints are largely ignored at my company (in the sense that we don't change our policy every time our customers asks us to), the one thing that gets my company moving is attrition (aka customers leaving). While I'm not explicitly advocating this, I can guarantee you that if played hours significantly dropped (i.e. you guys all stop playing) Bungie would seriously reconsider a lot of the recent changes they've made. Until then, they'll stick with their heavily researched decisions.[/quote] Here you go, Bnet. Given, I quit this forum months ago, so I don't know how much salt there currently is here (and I certainly don't care enough to look). My bet is even more than before, so I think this is a good reminder for you all. Edit: I will not be replying to this threads "debates". These arguments I'm seeing are the same ones I've answered a thousand times and the reason I left. I realized back in December that the things I say gave no impact because of just how dense the people here are and I made this thread knowing that.