Why should I care what some random tech analyst thinks of Destiny 2? Why is this even news?

I’m not gonna lie... this kind of makes me sad. Bungie won’t learn. They never learn. Their arrogance and greed have cost them billions and cost us all our favorite game.

Now I'm sorry that a lot of the BDF will disagree with this but, the blame HAS to lie with everyone at Bungie who advocated the change of direction rather than putting out a game that was a continuation of the first game with all of the first games locations (slightly updated) and the new locations. I strongly believe that the redirection was because giving out that amount of content off the bat would have mean that people didn't need to rely on bright engrams and eververse and it would have been pushed into the background where it belonged. It also would have been IMPOSSIBLE to cut up the original D2 game into paid DLC segments as you would have been selling people back patrol zones and planets they already had in D1. This would have necessitated creating ACTUAL new content of at least the same depth as a Moon, Cosmodrome or Venus patrol area along with a full raid and story campaign for each new DLC. Bungie are now in the exact situation I said a few weeks ago. Thinking that they are fine while their funding arm Activision is seriously looking at either taking full control or dumping the project and cutting their losses. Some BDF people seem to be under a very misguided illusion that D2 was a massive success when released. This simply isn't the case. Over it's lifetime D1 sold around the 20 to 30 million mark. D2 has sold a paltry 8 million. This sale was FASTER then D1 for the initial pick-up but, has no ability to match it's predecessors numbers now. To put this into a context that the BDF can grasp I'll use this analogy:- If a movie studio (closes match in industries to games) makes a block-buster movie sequel for 300 million and then has the second best opening box office of the year selling 120 million worth of tickets over the first two weeks. Then word get's out that the new movie is a real dog. Two things have happened. The marketing team will be touting movie X as the second highest grossing movie of the year. They will be touting it as having done better box office than it's predecessor over the same release time period. However, what they will not mention is that the predecessor (which was a flawed but, pretty ok movie) did a lifetime box-office of say 900 million ticket sales. They will not mention that the movies sequel is still a full 180 million tickets from breaking even. Has no real prospect of breaking even as momentum has died and that there will now not be a sequel 3. They will fail to mention these things because they don't want to adversely affect their prospects of getting as many people as possible to see the movie before word reaches saturation and theatres start taking it off their main screens and showing it as those odd times when they have a gap to fill. Behind the scenes and out of public view the movies investors are asking when they will see a return on their money for the sequel and the studio is having to say that the numbers don't look good but, they anticipate a pick up with the third movie in the trilogy. The investors can now go one of two ways. Remove their funding for the third installment and invest in a new movie. Keep backing the franchise in the hope that they re-coup their investment with a third installment or pull out altogether and back a different movie studio. This in a nutshell is where D2 is at. The talk about using eververse to make up the shortfall in sales should now hopefully make a little more sense to those wondering what shortfall they were anticipating. Well in Destiny terms the shortfall is the 22 million additional sales over the lifetime of the D2 game that they clearly were aware the released product couldn't hope to drive.

Unfortunately, the article is biased against Bungie and/or Activision, so it's hard to tell how much concern is really there. I say they're biased because of this closing comment: "The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment." The key there is the word "immediately". They're not allowed to outright lie, which means that Bungie [b]were[/b] available for comment, but possibly not at whatever ridiculous deadline CNBC gave them, who probably set such a deadline knowing it would be impossible for them to arrange an appropriate coherent statement at short notice, so they could print sensational nonsense that implied Bungie were uncooperative about the whole thing. There's no news like bad news, as they say, and unfortunately "bungie addresses market concerns" doesn't generate as much clickbait as the implication of "bungie refused to comment". That last line then offsets the whole piece, and i can't place faith in its suggestions. I'll wait for some more neutral analysis.

I might as well copy paste, since that's all the rage on the forums these days: People defending Bungie and attacking them on this forum, are for the most part a bunch of knee-jerk reactionists. You see the posts that get attention either way, and they are ALL troll posts. Like this one. It forces people with brains on either side, who talk normally about things, to have to post on these threads. Trolls dominate all the feedback boards. Which by the way are supposed to mostly be about negative feedback because that's mostly the feedback that's given. The difference here is Bungie's board stopped being about legitimate criticism about bad stuff and dominated by people who cant put together a coherent argument and only use one source. There's no trusting the posts because they can't be their own devil's advocate. Most people do not love every single thing about Destiny 2, and most people do not hate every single thing about it. Probably why Bungie can't figure out what feedback is worth bothering with.

[b][i]Monster Hunter in 2 days![/i][/b]

Activision won’t be touched by this. Bungie stand to lose a whole lot though. I honestly thought that I would come back to D2, but since I left and went to warframe and the division I’m starting to see D2 in a different light, apart from all the big issues I think it’s aimed at a far younger demographic. I’m finally starting to realise that D2 broke this franchise for me, a real big shame, it had so so much potential.

Are you paid by EA, Ubisoft,...?

Activision went from publishing 10+ different games per year, down to three in 2017. Say what you want about EA, but at least the number of games did not drop through the floor, even if most of them were sequels; same goes for Ubisoft. So I do not believe regular industry logic applies to Destiny. Activision does not have big IP games, such as Star Wars. They had Transformers, but ran that license into the ground with C-Tier games which got pulled early 2018 as a result. The Skylanders hype is over as well it seems, Toys R Us going bankrupt is another nail in that coffin. By only wanting to do license cash grabs and big blockbuster games with aggressive monetization, Activision has lost all ability to innovate over the past five years. Unless something else comes along, Activision will have to double down on what little they got. CoD and Destiny are only the best selling games of 2017 in terms of revenue, it is not as if the money earned couldn't pay for the bills. If Activision went to any other publisher and told them they could have their sales but in exchange Activision demands human sacrifice, the results would be rivers running red.