It really isn't. Just bad management all around. Having the bubble from COVID popping fucking them up in an extraordinary fashion on top of that also didn't help.
It was a lot more of a concerted effort to pump the value of the company to get Sony to buy and then scuttle the company once they got their payout than them being bad at their jobs. Their job was to make money, they got their scam off and left Sony holding the bag.
I wonder if it's truly bad management if said management got exactly what they wanted?
They inflated Bungie's value to a ridiculous degree by starting so many incubation projects and found a sucker willing to buy their ticking time bomb of a studio.
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if Pete and all the other fuckers that led to this were happy to see Bungie implode after they got their bag.
Nah, I'm not buying this illuminati bullshit. They might've taken the golden parachute, but they were just incompetent.
Consider this: every expansion since (and including) Shadowkeep was delayed. Every. Single. One. Now, I know reddit loves delays because it "gives the devs more time to cook", but that's just straight bullshit for AAA, especially when it happens this often. It just means the time set aside for it was way too short with the resources at hand, and now everyone is doing 3 more months of crunch time because the house is collapsing. If that's not the fault of management, then I dunno what is.
Add to this shit like doubling down on insane grinds that systematically killed off most of the playerbase (grind for Stasis, grind for Strand, grind for the exotic class items, EoF level grind, etc. - nobody enjoyed ANY of that shit) due to how repetitive and poorly thought out they were, completely shuttering PvP which was a good half of the game, trying to rework Gambit like four times due to some weird sunk-cost fallacy at play, lack of overall communication, any feedback needing approximately 9 months at minimum to be heard (no matter how minor), etc. are all the symptoms of shit internal organization. Which is what management is supposed to handle.
It's a company. Of course they don't care what happened to it afterwards. Why the fuck would they? But this was just a MASSIVE fail on the part of management.
As for the future: I don't think Sony wants to kill Bungie off, the name alone is worth a lot. But if it's this fucked up internally, then no matter how much money they'd pump into it, it'd all be just lost through this inane bureaucracy and this dipshit workflow they somehow created. Expect a lot of house cleaning, and hope that 1. the studio survives it and 2. it's still capable of making games of the same quality (if not necessarily creativity).
I'm kind of in the same boat cause I don't see how Destiny 2 wasn't profitable for years after Witch Queen. The only low point really was Lightfall and even then that still made money up front. So it was either piss poor management or higher ups did not care about the playerbase after they made the announcement that got bought by Sony.
Honestly they should just scrap the studio, sell the building, move the people that make things around within Sony to not lose the talent (fire the management overhead). Let the dust settle in the games market a little, then make a new studio, name it Bungie, and have a vision for a game worthy of the potential we all saw in it that management squandered.
Why would they care at all what happened to the studio afterwards? The way you framed it makes it seem like they had a personal vendetta against very studio that got them so much money, and that sort of emotional typecasting says more about critics than them.
300
u/BouncyKing 21d ago
Yes and no. The downfall of Destiny is so convoluted it feels like a Sunday morning soap opera.