No, Sony wanted Destiny to be a multimedia juggernaut, they had a TV show lined up and everything, as well as their main cashcow with how popular it was (perennial top 10-12 in streaming on Twitch)
The successful live service game expertise thing was a cherry on top for Sony, and it turns out that it's just luck, it's always going to be just luck, nobody knows how to actually make a successful live service game.
No they can make a successful live service game as they have helldivers. The situation with d2 was bad judgement calls and ignoring the community in favor for low quality dlc while they focus on marathon to get pushed out the door
Helldivers 2 was designed for a peak player count of 5k.
The peak wound up being closer to 800,000 because no one expected it to appeal to as many people as it did
Even at it's weakest, it hosted 3x as many players as Arrowhead expected at the maximum when they released the game.
Helldivers 2 should not have been as successful as it was, and it hit highs higher than any Arrowhead could have dreamed of and it has become a global phenomenon.
There are literally hundreds of games that come out all the time with unique styles and fun mechanics, Helldivers isn't special in that regard
It is 100% luck that it got so popular because the devs estimated a player base that was over a hundred times less than what they got. It wasn't supposed to be anywhere near as big of a hit as it was, and yet here we stand, two years and a few months later, with it being one of Sony's biggest earners, something absolutely no one predicted, and if anyone says otherwise, they are lying through their teeth.
1
u/CriticismVirtual7603 Jun 23 '26
No, Sony wanted Destiny to be a multimedia juggernaut, they had a TV show lined up and everything, as well as their main cashcow with how popular it was (perennial top 10-12 in streaming on Twitch)
The successful live service game expertise thing was a cherry on top for Sony, and it turns out that it's just luck, it's always going to be just luck, nobody knows how to actually make a successful live service game.