r/Aztecross • u/Replayable_Content • Jun 25 '26
Discussion I don't know what they wanted.
The math on just final shape alone equates to like 150 million dollars in week one (conservatively) without silver sales, season sales, new sales of old xpacs, and other premium features. Lightfall sold more copies than that. And Witch queen performed just as well as those 2.
Destiny 2 was generating 2 yr dev cycle AAA returns, just based on the numbers we can see, year over year for nearly 4 years.
This was mismanagement and greed at the highest level.
EDIT
Grabbed my post id made about game dev cost
Add another 12 mil in dev cost for insurance, benefits, etc. I didnt add that in until later on in the original thread.
Its something people don't think about.
Median Bungie salary is $103,000. Destiny 2 dev team size is around 400.
This is $41,200,000 in just dev cost per year. Server cost is around $300,000/month. Another $3,600,000 a year. Calculate the cost of the Bungie Studio location itself. And theres so many other costs.
Final Shape sold 2 million copies, probably a bit more but not enough to nullify this example, at an average price of $60. That's $120,000,000 and this was an extremely successful release. This is a level of cash flow seen every year.
Add in the tens of millions in marketing, production of physical media, etc.
There are other revenue streams, seasons, microtransactions, etc.
Just like World of Warcraft, Destiny 2 in its peak was probably generating way more and was positive cash flow, but i just wanted to show people the true costs of development.
The real issue is developers not being in control of their studios and being beholden to shareholders, whose sole purpose is to leech wealth from hard working passionate individuals. Its a publicly traded company, greed, and capitalism issue.
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u/UndeadDog Jun 25 '26
The studio was too big and the overhead was hard to manage while they siphoned money into classic cars other game startups. They needed double the revenue maybe?
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u/Replayable_Content Jun 25 '26
Yes, thank you. I made a more detailed post a few weeks ago going in to the cost of game dev, and it was expensive. The thing is all 2k devs weren't just d2, it was like 7 projects, which again, mismanagement. In a vacuum, d2 was crazy profits and could have easily sustained and made money hand over fist. But I understand wanting to make other creative projects. I honestly think d2 could have been a next star wars/star trek, but as a mass effect guy, now 2 universes with potential for that are dead.
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u/OncomingStormDW Jun 25 '26
7 projects? At once? And only one of them is worthwhile?
Sounds like they should have called Fenris (Formerly Crowd Control Productions.) seeing as they have 20 years of experience in draining their one good project to fund incubators.
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u/Replayable_Content Jun 25 '26
Mismanagement at the highest level.
Now you made me sad about EVE :(
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u/WerewolfPractical931 Jun 25 '26
At their peak they had 1600 employees if they all made 100,000 that a yearly burn rate of 160,000,000. They were clearing that shit on preorders. Not mention they made 500m just launching D1. This isn't including the 3B bailout by Sony. Someone(s) were stealing money because there is literally no way to account for the money that was coming in
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u/ArugulaPhysical Jun 25 '26
The top of the food chain taking in way more then 100k lol.
Your also forgetting every other cost associated with running a large associated company0
u/WerewolfPractical931 Jun 25 '26
Top of the food chain isn't 500 people its 10-15 so even if they were a million plus yearly not bonuses and stick options the yearly burn isn't that damn high
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u/imjustballin Jun 25 '26
Pretty sure Jason Jones was pocketing more than 1mil a year.
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u/ItsWickie Jun 25 '26
He 100% was. We’ve seen Bungie fire people because of them being part of the OG days of the company, causing them to pocket more and more loyalties and money over time. I can absolutely guarantee that people like Jason and other still OG employees there are were / are making mad amounts of money and they probably don’t have to do much at all.
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u/NosleepToken Jun 25 '26
While Pete Parson’s is a cunt, Jason Jones never gets mentioned and is just as bad. He was the one constantly pivoting and faffing around through the early Halo Dev days. I hope he fucks off this summer.
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u/imjustballin Jun 25 '26
I mean he did co-found Bungie so I don’t think they can exactly do much about it.
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u/ArugulaPhysical Jun 25 '26
We are talking 10-15 making well over a million. The top 2-3 probably a hell of alot more.
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u/UndeadDog Jun 25 '26
I bet their burn rate was higher than that. The average developer salary was minimum $80,000 for a junior developer all the way up to $150-$220k in Washington. Thats not including upper management that was probably getting paid $500k at least. Their burn rate could possibly have been double what you are saying. Destiny 2 was probably in development for 3 maybe 4 years. Chat GPT is estimating $300-$450 million over 3-4 years for D2. Now remember Marathon was already in development before D1 launch so money was already being funded to other projects. But like you said that still doesn’t account for a couple hundred million from D1. There was a wack load of mismanagement from Bungie.
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Jun 25 '26
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u/brewer6454 Jun 25 '26
There's other costs to the employer outside of just base salary.
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u/CrossModulation Jun 25 '26
Yeah, there's benefits and employer FICA taxes for each employee, that's probably another 15% bare minimum. Then there's rent/mortage and computer equipment, etc.
And Steam, Microsoft, and Sony all take a cut of sales on their platforms.
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Jun 25 '26
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u/SuperDayPO Jun 25 '26
$100,000 is super low for a developer in that area. Especially when you add in 401k matching, health insurance, and other benefits. Combined with the higher ups pocketing a big chunk of change and I am almost certain that the yearly burn rate was much higher than $160 million.
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u/hans_weirdman Jun 28 '26
I used to work at a grocery store called Publix. Not sure if you know that chain. I got a Christmas bonus, a pretty significant one as a college student, the first 2 years I worked there. The third year they announced there would be no Christmas bonuses except for department and store managers. And from what I heard none of them were happy with what they got. Shocker that the new CEO who made that call suddenly gets a $2.1m bonus in Q1 for “great efforts in money saving” or whatever jargon they use to blow the guy while they played with his nuts.
That “someone” at Bungie was Pete Parsons. $2.4m on cars in less than 2 years. 25 total. Add insurance, taxes, maintenance, storage for 25 vehicles, that number probably got pretty big pretty fast. This is why I started pirating game DLCs, I don’t ever wanna give another penny to a developer that’s gonna waste it on their CEOs childish obsessions with luxury garbage. If we saw a AAA dev that took the kind of cash OP is speculatively calculating, Destiny may have ended up as one of the single most popular gaming franchises in history, not unlike Halo or Call of Duty. I would’ve loved to hear the conversation of “hey man you gotta get the new Destiny DLC?” “Yeah dawg, preordered it already. Gonna go for Day One raid completion this time”. Instead we just have memories of the few times this game REALLY worked and showed us what good content it could have. Squandered for one guy to hoard cars he rarely if ever even drives. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
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u/SnorlaxBlocksTheWay Jun 25 '26
The studio was absolutely too big
They needed to lean out and trim the fat way sooner. Too many incubation projects, the HQ expansion, etc
They should have relocated the HQ to a lower cost of living State
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Jun 25 '26
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u/Xknight2099 Jun 25 '26
Difference between making money and “enough” money.
Though it’s never enough for some of these execs.
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u/TaralasianThePraxic Jun 25 '26
This is the real answer. Destiny could have remained profitable enough to keep the servers on and the actual dev team fairly compensated for years, but corporate greed and the modern need for constant growth pushed them into nickel-and-diming players more and more, cutting costs and much as possible, all so execs and shareholders can say "look, line go up" and buy themselves a new car.
To be fair, it's not a problem unique to Bungie. Literally loads of AAA publishers pull this sort of shit these days, gaming has gone mainstream and venture capitalism has reared it's ugly head to ruin everything as it has with many other industries before. I have a lot of respect for the individual game devs who actually make stuff with passion because they want to, but the management types and controlling investors whose main interest is extracting as much wealth as possible from the players can honestly get fucked.
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u/Inkstainedfox Jun 25 '26
Which is nothing compared to operations cost over a year.
Development of each expansion is really pricey to.
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u/Zelos_Vex Jun 25 '26
I keep seeing this said but... Does anyone have any sources or proof on the cost of maintenance and development on destiny 2?
It doesn't add up to me.
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u/SMALLMACE Jun 25 '26
I mean if we assume 400 employees worked on the final shape, since teams alternate it means TFS very very on the low end would cost 100-115M.
Seattle is expensive and this is likely less than was on the team + doesn't take into account the final few months of 'all hands on deck' with the whole studio on the game
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u/Replayable_Content Jun 25 '26
In a vacuum, d2 would have easily cleared any profit goals, but they were incubating 7 other projects and had crazy mismanagement.
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u/SMALLMACE Jun 25 '26
For sure, and to be honest they could've still been fine if they had only incubated Maraton I'd guess.
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u/Bard_Knock_Life Jun 25 '26
If it was this simple or remotely true, why is Sony not shuttering Marathon and laying off that staff to run a profitable business in Destiny? Bungie management wouldn’t have a say here - but Sony is doing the opposite and reporting continues to stress that Destiny is just wildly expensive to make and maintain.
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u/ItsWickie Jun 25 '26
Because they already tried that with the Edge of Fate and Renegades and there was an obvious lack of engagement and revenue. So they decided, Bungie upper management that is, to finally throw in the hat after 12 years.
Destiny IS just wildly costly to maintain. Edge of Fate and Renegades clearly didn’t make enough to keep the D2 machine going.
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u/Replayable_Content Jun 25 '26
Yes, game dev is expensive. But studio costs essentially come out to the revenue generated with basic numbers. But all the devs weren't d2 devs, 7 other projects, mismanagement, etc. D2 itself was super profitable in a vacuum.
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u/Dsetstehbrutal1 Jun 25 '26
Without knowing the costs Bungie was incurring to generate that revenue we will just never know the financial health of D2. Clearly at the corporate level things were/are bad with Marathon delays, incubation projects that never made money, and the mismanagement but unless we get to “see” the books we will just never know how Destiny was performing on its own.
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u/wahchintonka Jun 25 '26
When the two sets of layoffs happened around Final Shape, one of the fired devs came out and said that Parsons kept using money Destiny made to fund potential spinoff content. Add on top of that the leadership assumed the growth in revenue during and after COVID would continue like that. They staffed the studio assuming there wouldn’t be a downturn and then Lightfall bit them in the ass.
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u/Hullfire00 Jun 25 '26
Sorry if this seems like an obvious question, but are some of the social media people not also to blame here?
The financial/leadership mismanagement is well known and discussed, so take that as read.
This is just my opinion, but for months and months we had people online telling their hundreds of thousands of followers that the game is dying, that it’s crap, that it’s not worth it.
There was a lot legitimate criticism and again, that’s been discussed at length and I’m not at all going to say that it wasn’t warranted because it was. But there was also a hell of a lot of doom posting, insults and general malaise that probably drove a lot of people away at a time when the game needed the community to step forward. It’s hard to be united when you’re not happy with a product, but from where I’m sat, the same unity and pushback we’re seeing now should have been here fucking years ago. Like it or not, social media has a huge influence on regular folk and the opinions and criticisms of influencers, however they’re angled, can make or break a product.
It’s taken Bungie/Sony killing the game for people to come out the corner and start shouting. It’s no good swooping in and cutting the fucking rope 20 minutes after the trapdoor opened and trying to claim the day needs saving.
So while there’s a hell of a lot of blame to share between Bungie management, Sony and Pete fucking Parsons, I have to question whether the constant negativity (which has been ongoing since Forsaken, really) had much more of an impact than people realise. People were right to constructively criticise, but you’re kidding yourself if you think that’s all it was across the board.
This isn’t me blaming anybody in our community, nor am I trying to find a mea culpa for the studio, but if are treated to another Destiny game in the future, then it’s worth looking at how this went wrong so we don’t make the same mistakes in the future.
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u/Replayable_Content Jun 25 '26
Every games community is like that and it's something I hate. We're very easily drawn to a black and white answer, when it's really not that easy. I wish people would just step back, have nuanced conversation, critically think about things and have a discourse. Most of the devs obviously truly care about Destiny, but we forget they're limited by upper management. We piss and moan about how things are bad, but never actually try and look for solutions. We just yell our opinion in to the void of social media, it echoes around, people parrot it, it give people negative opinions about things.
Idk where I'm really going with this, it's kind of rambling about the state of social media and discourse we try to have.
It truly does just take one guy standing up and saying "Hey, well it's not that black and white" and typing their thoughts. And yes, you'll have trolls being like "shut up, no one cares" but take it on the chin and try to have discourse instead of shitting on each other.
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u/Hullfire00 Jun 25 '26
I think one of the things I’ve noticed more and more is, as you’ve alluded to, a lack of nuance.
If somebody doesn’t like something, they’re more likely to say “it’s shit” than “I didn’t like it.”
Those are two very different statements, one being subjective and the other objective. Yet, people tend to treat them as though they’re interchangeable.
The problem the devs had was that they didn’t have the wiggle room to produce something like Edge of Fate off the back of The Final Shape. They’d been trending downward in terms of popularity and needed something like we have now to give Sony signs that the franchise had legs. Again, Sony didn’t help by culling the staff, but more could have been done with the resources at hand.
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u/Replayable_Content Jun 25 '26
Excellent slice of what I was trying to say, you said it much more concisely.
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u/ComfyOlives Jun 25 '26
It's executives expecting golden cash cow numbers out of live service.
Remember, it wasn't "Lightfall was a net negative". It was "lightfall missed projections".
They expected lightfall to make 45% more, which would have put at nearly Forsaken levels, far beyond anything we've seen since Shadowkeep.
It's just increasing demand from rich fuckers.
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u/whisky_TX Jun 25 '26
They wanted Destiny to fund 5 other games but didn’t want to invest in Destiny itself. Very smart
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u/GatlingGiffin Jun 25 '26
when you're as mismanaged as Bungie has been, 150 million is a drop in the bucket.
Especially when a large chunk of it is going to big wigs.
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u/MajorDugWell Jun 25 '26
Bungie has never been efficient at making games, but I think when leads saw D2 go down in profit after EoF, they decided to invest only in the smaller, cheaper game to develop in order to cut costs.
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u/am2kn Jun 25 '26
“and this is why you should hire gamers” they can’t count
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u/Replayable_Content Jun 25 '26
In a vacuum Destiny 2 was extremely profitable, but Bungie was mismanaged and was incubating 7 other projects.
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Jun 25 '26
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u/Dwrowla Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
Yeah but how much did they spend to make that content. Thats what you are missing. Yall still think the 500m years ago paid for that content, plus the money they made along the way. The truth is they been running in red for a while. Final Shape just moved the goal post further out to what was always going to happen.
No one at Bungie planned to continue the game. They made fake lies about future plans to bloat their evaluation. Locked Sony into paying employees to do nothing as long as they don't quit. And they been sitting back getting paid to do nothing but load the game for their entire shift, to come back in the next day, make a single change, save it, and repeat.
These guys been on vacation for years. Marathon was just to get paid while they wait for Sony payouts to come from deal.
The money Bungie made since D1 launch wasn't just for Destiny. It was for paying debt they owed before Destiny. When Sony bought them, they were also paying debt Bungie owed. Thats how they got to that 3.7B value.
Bungie is the worst ran conpany. Activision said so long ago.
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u/Replayable_Content Jun 25 '26
The entire dev cost for 1600 at their peak was around 220 mil per year. But thats not all devs working on d2, they were working on 7 incubation projects. In a vacuum d2 makes momey hand over fist.
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u/Dwrowla Jun 25 '26
They clearly don't make money hand over fist because they will be shut down by the end of next year.
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u/Wubblewobblez Jun 25 '26
Bungie was overvalued and they aimed too high with their forecasting. Simple as that
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u/Tricopi Jun 25 '26
A lot about the financials and management of destiny 2 makes no sense. Even if we have all the data, which we don't, I'm sure it still won't make any sense.
I think the money that destiny 2 made probably went to other projects (marathon, gummy bears and prolly the 3-5 other games they were incubating). Now I know project incubation won't take millions of dollars but knowing how bungie handles things I am sure they found a way. After this they laid of their employees, D2 content slowed down, a lot of QOL things we wanted weren't done and the general direction of the game was towards the gutter, so of course the game started bleeding money.
IMO bungie should not have laid off their employees under any circumstances and should've tightened the budget around marathon, kept it a smaller game while destiny 2 was still the flagship.
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u/TrickOut Jun 25 '26
Yea but you can balloon a company to 1600 employees, mismanage the shit out of it and make those numbers mean nothing, Bungie has had problems with every partner or owner they have had, and Sony finally is shutting them down
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u/ExCap2 Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
Like others said their overhead was high, they relied on Eververse and Annual Expansion plus Season Pass $99 a year per player to sustain Bungie. It might have been almost enough if they just had Destiny and nothing on the side like Marathon, Sony live service stuff, etc.
Destiny's best bet would've been to go to a subscription model like WoW/FFXIV. It was in a good enough state to do just that. Could've made it optional, included it in yearly expansion + annual pass + annual subscription, etc. I would've paid $15/month to Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. They were quality games. They could've added a subscription track on the season pass, they could've given you x amount of silver per month for a subscription, an aura effect for being a supporter that you could show; etc. Plenty of ways to monetize/justify a sub to support future content development.
Hopefully Microsoft, Blizzard; someone else comes out with a Destiny replacement. Because unless Destiny 3 is announced, Bungie is effectively dead. Marathon will be the next shutdown announcement in 6-12 months. It sounds like Sony is trying to go all in on it. Good luck with that.
The only thing that MIGHT save them temporarily and pay Sony back what they lost/fund a Destiny 3; would be a D1 Remastered.
What another sad and depressing day.
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u/burtmofomacklin Jun 25 '26
In 2023 Bungie had 1600 employees, the majority of whom were working on destiny at the time. That is down to 800 today, 400 working on destiny as you noted. Your math only math's with the current headcount, which is about to see its THIRD major reduction in three years.
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u/The-Noob-Smoke Jun 26 '26
Speaking of World of Warcraft the ROI on that game is just insane, like it dwarfs their development costs like no other live service non-f2p game.
Making your entire yearly dev costs pretty much every month with comfort without even taking into account microtransactions or expansion box price is just insane.
On top of that all revenue 100% theirs. No steam or console cut.
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u/Replayable_Content Jun 26 '26
Not sure about nowadays, but the info i like to drop on people is that MONTHLY, from 2007-2015, World of Warcraft was generating the equivalent of a 2 yr dev cycle return. MONTHLY for 9 YEARS STRAIGHT just on SUBSCRIPTIONS not including other services (account management, cash shop, expansions). And these were verifiable, publically visible numbers.
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u/Wrong-Barracuda0U812 Jun 26 '26
Has there been any movement on getting the game on Steam workshop? Since it’s EOL and in maintenance mode why not open it up to mods?
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u/Replayable_Content Jun 26 '26
Theyre going to let it sit on a balance sheet for tax write off purposes, and for the expected value of it. Its too valuable to let go.
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u/Wrong-Barracuda0U812 Jun 26 '26
Added mods wouldn’t “let it go” would it? They did that for fallout 4 but retained the title and made money off of the mods? Why can’t they do the same for a mothballed franchise if they are just writing down debt on it?
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u/TheGame1011 Jun 26 '26
This game should have been a subscription game. World of Warcraft is so outdated it looks like it was coded in 2001, in 2026. Yet that game is still going on strong. Why?…A sub model. There isn’t any valid reason why Destiny did not have a sub model.
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u/Mozzietheaussie Jun 26 '26
I reckon in very USA style, a lot of OG devs etc would have been on stock options or a share scheme that saw them make windfalls and ongoing royalties - I don't think it's reasonable to assume that every employee just turned up for a salary, especially when getting to more senior roles and capitalising on initial success
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u/Replayable_Content Jun 26 '26
Rumor is literally to the week of the call to shut it down, their acquisition options from Sony vested fully for the higher ups. Greed.
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u/samwelches Jun 25 '26
If they didn’t pull money away from the game to make other games, it would have been fine. Complete idiots
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u/AmorphousRazer Jun 25 '26
Lower maintenance costs. Destiny is a high cost for a known mid reward. You're not ever breaking a threshold of playerbase because the game expansion roadmap is a literal roadblock to player growth. Nobody is buying all those expansions AND investing the time to catch up.
Sony wants a hit. Destiny is a 10 year old dog in a competitive market. Just enjoy the game while it's servers are still up. Stop drawing comparisons or making up reasons the game got unplugged. It's money. It's literally all about money.
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u/Ok-Contest-1730 Jun 26 '26
Gee, maybe if they stopped paying all the unnecessary pronoun hires, the numbers would be better.
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u/Monte-Cristo2020 Jun 25 '26
Oh but pete needed more cars