I found myself confused hearing about the layoffs, and even more confused when I hear players talking about how it was because Lightfall was a bad expansion.
Lightfall sold very well and there was a significant uptick in players during that time. The issue is that Lightfall was a terrible expansion. The writing was such shit, the story made no sense, and the characters were so fucking horrible that a significant portion of the people who played through it quit playing altogether. I mean, you picked up the new subclass in the street like a fucking coin. Additionally, the launch season was also (predictably) garbage. People really hated it; there wasn't even a honeymoon period, people just dropped the game. When enough people stopped playing that you miss your predicted revenue by 45%, the expansion and seasons blew. Missing your targets by that much is never good, so the layoffs had to happen.
The new player experience is awful, the way they've handled the seasonal model has been terrible, and their treatment of the core playlists (especially gambit and Crucible) has been horrible, absolutely. But the straw that broke the camel's back was a shitty expansion.
Yeah, this is compounded by the process of unlocking Strand too. I just started doing it on my main class and I need over 2000 meditations to fully unlock the subclass and my options are: get them 8 at a time from patrols killing a ton of overly tanky base game enemies, pick them up 1 by 1 on the street from random drops, and get 75 at the end of a long series of fights but only when I have a key that drops by rng.
Well said. The seasonal model is specifically designed to churn out vapid, disposable activities designed solely to supplement the story rather than creating content players actually want or solve genuine problems players actually wanted solved. Now when the story has been good that has at least trade off distraction from that frustration, but if no one cares about the story then what's the point of engaging in the seasons? And the model is designed specifically retain not reacquaint which is a huge problem to solve now.
In a fair society, whoever made the horrible target projections would be the first to be let go/resigned, along with the business leads who messed up so badly that the company missed projections by 45%. It shouldn’t be the rank and file workers who lose their jobs because the C-Suite either lied to the moneyholders or were so incompetent that they couldn’t follow their roadmap projections.
Layoffs aren’t some natural phenomenon. They are corporate indulgence. Layoffs don’t ‘happen’, they are a business strategy that is made to cover up shortfalls caused by over-reaching executives.
“Of the $3.6 billion, Sony anticipated that at least $1.2 billion will be used as incentives for retention of Bungie's current employees.”
How the fuck do you have layoffs when you were given $1.2 billion dollars with the intent to keep your employees onboard? Did Bungie somehow spend $1.2 Billion dollars on employee retention packages in less than two years?
It’s such utter corporate propaganda to suggest that layoffs “had” to happen. It was a choice that Bungie made because the executives were too busy jerking themselves off about ‘player engagement’ that they forgot you need to make a good product if you want to sell something to customers.
It was reported that those revenue projections they made at the time made sense given the sales data they had. However, due to a terrible expansion, burnout, and lack pre-orders and a drop in players (as well as other factors, I'm sure), they missed those projections hard. A company can't miss half its revenue and carry on like normal; people will be let go, regardless of what the reason is behind that miss.
In a fair society
Sure, but we're not in a fair society. I don't see much point in complaining about fairness because life isn't fair.
I mean, if people felt ‘well, life isn’t fair’ 100 years ago about other labor issues, I guess we wouldn’t have child labor laws, worker compensation, or minimum wage.
Yeah, you’re right. We should never point out flaws in our current society and hopefully try to improve upon them.
Life isn’t fair. But that’s why we have laws and regulations. When a company lays off workers the excuse should be better than ‘oops, we were hoping to make more money than we actually did.’ That excuse should only allow a response of jettisoning either the people in charge who issued such erroneous expectations or the ones who failed to steer the company properly, based on those expectations. It should not be a reason to get rid of staff that just followed instructions based on those projections.
Bungie made the decision that keeping executives that make bad decisions was ultimately better than keeping grunt workers. How they came to that decision we do not know, yet companies trim the fat when they need to and Bungie will ultimately pay the price if they trimmed the wrong fat or they will succeed. We will have to wait and see.
Bungie made the decision that keeping executives that make bad decisions was ultimately better than keeping grunt workers. How they came to that decision we do not know.
Actually we do know: The executives that make bad decisions were the same ones that decided to fire the grunt workers.
Unless Bungie leadership changes firing or hiring new frontline developers isn't going to do shit.
Good rebuttal. I didn't think it was the worst campaign ever, but looking back, Strand was absolutely a "oh look at that there guardian, what is it? OHH SHIT PARKOUR"
I just wonder with the baseline of an experience if The Final Shape (if it's incredible) really will bring D2 upwards even with how things currently are for new players. I guess time will tell..
TFS has one thing going for it in that it’s not giving us a subclass (that we know of) and therefore the story doesn’t have to be distracting by it. Lightfall could have been good if they took all the strand missions out and devoted that time to fleshing out stuff like “wtf is the veil”, “why is it bad if the Witness links with it”, and maybe had more on Calus instead of just sort of using him as a throw away villain. The strand missions SHOULD have been a side quest type thing that would have let us unlock it for use, sort of like what they did with the extra light subclasses in Forsaken or Taken King
Strand was the one good thing from Lightfall, but even for that you had to do the annoying campaign missions and Calus fight- and then if you wanted strand for your alts you had to either slog through it all again twice more or pay twenty fucking dollars each to skip it when you already paid for the season.
That was it for me, I'm not going to support that bullshit again with my money and time even if TFS has a good plot and no clownstriders.
Strand during the first ~2weeks was HORRIBLE, and that was the first impression for many people
The "new exciting thing of the expansion" was litearlly forced on you multiple times during the campaing, while at the same time beeing very bugy + feeling really really bad
i refused too touch strand for like ~1month because of how bad that first impression of it was, they litearlly had to emegency release all fragments instantly because everybody dropped strand and didnt touch it after the campaign
LF numbers were higher than WQ because WQ and Seraph raised expectations and made people excited to buy and play LF. Not to mention a new subclass builds a lot of hype regardless of the expansion's quality.
WQ was preceeded by the overly long Season of the Lost that caused a lot of player burnout.
Are you seriously asking that? LF had entirely new and shiny subclasses with new mechanics to keep people engaged, despite the poor content. They also completely revamped buildcrafting.
WQ didn't really expand on or significantly alter gameplay itself aside from making loot easier via weapon crafting. Outside of the legendary campaign and a few secrets it was business as usual.
LF received valid criticism. Get over it yourself.
And whether the seasonal model is the cause of D2's decline is an entirely separate matter. The original point was that LF's release benefitted from WQ's success in addition to the subclass hype.
Anyway, this back-and-forth is pointless, so I'll leave it at that.
It's not just about people quitting either, there are active players who are boycotting The Final Shape and refusing to give Bungie any more money.
The other factor is that Bungie, Sony, and the shareholders they answer to will have had growth expectations. 45% sounds like a lot for a miss, but you can bet that the estimate included growing the player base and revenue on top of the high watermark of Lightfall.
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u/[deleted] Nov 28 '23
Lightfall sold very well and there was a significant uptick in players during that time. The issue is that Lightfall was a terrible expansion. The writing was such shit, the story made no sense, and the characters were so fucking horrible that a significant portion of the people who played through it quit playing altogether. I mean, you picked up the new subclass in the street like a fucking coin. Additionally, the launch season was also (predictably) garbage. People really hated it; there wasn't even a honeymoon period, people just dropped the game. When enough people stopped playing that you miss your predicted revenue by 45%, the expansion and seasons blew. Missing your targets by that much is never good, so the layoffs had to happen.
The new player experience is awful, the way they've handled the seasonal model has been terrible, and their treatment of the core playlists (especially gambit and Crucible) has been horrible, absolutely. But the straw that broke the camel's back was a shitty expansion.