this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
131 points (96.5% liked)

Games

41019 readers
1796 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Rules

1. Submissions have to be related to games

Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.

This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.

2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.

We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.

3. No excessive self-promotion

Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.

This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.

4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you're submitting before posting to see if it's already been posted.

We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.

5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.

No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.

6. No linking to piracy

Don't share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.

We don't want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.

Authorized Regular Threads

Related communities

PM a mod to add your own

Video games

Generic

Help and suggestions

By platform

By type

By games

Language specific

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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@lemm.ee 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] beefcat@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

plenty of good games fail to meet revenue projections

[–] GoodEye8@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

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@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago

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@social.packetloss.gg 1 points 2 years ago

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)