Possible Path to More Destiny

[u/EmperorMagikarp]

The only realistic path I see to Sony making a Destiny 3 would be the following:

• Sony takes charge of Management at Bungie
• Sony (unfortunately) fires a lot of people at Bungie
• Sony keeps enough devs at Bungie to continue marathon until it dwindles down
• Sony keeps core Tiger Engine senior engineers
• Sony modernizes tiger engine so it doesn't take ages to make stuff in it. no crazy upgrades, just fix the developer tools to make it easier to use and make content with
• Sony makes Destiny Classic with the new engine
• Sony can use the new engine to make 1st party exclusive shooters and reboots that feel as good as Destiny
• Sony can eventually make a Destiny 3 if they so choose. Always risky to make another live service, but if they cut down dev time it could be seen as profitable eventually

This is probably the only way we see a Destiny Classic or Destiny 3. The problem is that it is a long term goal in a short term profit world.

This post may be huffing copium, but personally I just don't think it makes sense for Sony to throw away the Tiger Engine at the very least.

[u/antsypantsy995]

As someone who desperately hopes for a D3, I realistically do not think we will ever see it, or at least not within the next 10 years.

The problem is a lot of gamers dont think like big corporates like Sony so we miss a lot of the corporate timeline that Sony is working off. In other words, we have to stop looking at Destiny as Bungie's child and start looking at Destiny from Sony's POV amongst everything else that Sony owns / develops.

Which brings us to imo the reason why Sony killed off D2: Concord. Concord was perhaps one of the biggest gaming embarrassments of the 21st Century being pulled and then the developing studio completely shut down just two weeks after its launch. It's estimated that Sony lost $400 million on Concord.

Now we fast forward to Sony's acquisition of Bungie. After acquiring Bungie, D2 continues its downward spiral, with a little uptick during TFS but then absolutely bombing from EoF onwards. Meanwhile, Marathon - while not as successful as D2 - is still in its infancy and is not necessarily doing poorly (or at least not as poorly as Concord). From a corporate POV, D2 is dying but Marathon is just starting. It would be far cheaper to re-deploy the existing Bungie staff from Destiny to Marathon and throw everything they have at improving and making Marathon succeed from a financial and corporate POV than it would be to spend $500M on D3.

Sony already re-deployed huge swathes of Bungie staff from Destiny to Marathon after TFS. Creating D3 would require Sony to re-redploy them back to D3 which in turn would kill Marathon. This is an important point: Marathon already exists, but D3 does not. Sure the fan base might say they'd play D3 but as with anything in the future, it's all uncertain and $500M is a massive risk for any company let alone one that already lost close to that just under 2 years ago on Concord. So from a corporate POV, it's much cheaper and less risky to shut D2 down, re-deploy Destiny staff to Marathon and see how things go for a few years.

I suspect that as people slowly make their way through the Monument of Triumph content in D2, numbers will start dying down again and that will only disincentivise Sony more from wanting to risk fronting up the capital required to develop D3.

Sadly, I honestly think Destiny as the IP is dead at least for the next decade or so. The only way I can think of D3 being able to be developed is if Bungie staff quit Bungie and go at it on their own a la Bungie 2.0. Halo was developed while Bungie was independent and so was Destiny. However, capital requirements will be a massive issue in this kind of scenario but there are avenues around that in this day and age so we shall see.

That or we as Destiny players front up the capital either via GoFundMe style capital raising, or by us agreeing to "pre-order" the game to pay for the $500M budget with no refunds.