Is Destiny depreciating?

The Mountains fall.

You'll often here me talk about the unshakable titans of the gaming industry that are infallible and never wrong, especially when they're wrong. I'm talking about foundational institutions like Call of Duty, like Assassin's Creed, like Fifa- franchises that could roll up to your home and shoot your mother in the face and you'd still buy their next title because we're that conditioned to bow down before them- sad as that is. (Hell, I'm playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla currently despite having an absolutely miserable time slogging through that swig of pre-digested pig swill that was Odyssey.) Games like that don't live in the same world as ours. They don't show weakness, never bleed and will never die. For a time I considered Destiny to be one among their number, but it seems I spoke too quickly because from everything we're seeing Destiny is heading along the path of destruction- which very well could just be the spark of a new beginning- but it could also just be a death knell.

Destiny is an important game to the games industry, not just to Bungie who own it. Why? Because it's the single most successful thesis in favour of the 'Live Service' model of business which is the favourite keyword of every heavy-set games industry executive of the day. Destiny introduced the concept to a lot of us, popularised the 'always adding content, keep weekly player numbers' mind set and raked in a simply vile amount of capital doing so. They even lied and re-released the game again- pretending they didn't promise not to do exactly that when launching Destiny 1, and still managed to stay a juggernaut for the industry. Hell, until Cyberpunk rolled around Destiny was testers favourite benchmarking game, it still has a highly competitive 'first raid competition' community every time a new one drops- and some truly insane people out there make entire online communities deciphering the half-vomit fan fiction train wreck this franchise calls a plot. (Okay it's not... actually, the more I think about it- it actually is that bad. Yeah... Destiny lore blows.)

So you can imagine what an absolute shock to the system it was to learn that Destiny's Bungie just laid off 8% of it's workforce, about 100 people, in it's personal contribution to the worker firing frenzy that the tech sector is going on throughout 2023. 100 People? How? Isn't the game painfully successful? Doesn't Bungie have enough money to pay for the upkeep of it's many many staff, or at the very least have enough to not have to surprise lay-off people one day before they lose medical coverage so that the company can... seriously do they get anything out of doing that? Or is that just the sadistically inhuman flair for the revolting evil that lies at the hearts of every executive bleeding out for no reason? My question stands: what could be going on in the world of Destiny to justify the letting go of so many staff? Well- given the numbers Bungie pulls there actually is no justification whatsoever, but what would the executives put down as their reasoning when email their prep lawyers in case of any sudden 'wrongful termination' lawsuits? (They've already got one on the way.)

Well the last expansion apparently didn't do so hot. That sounds like a bit of a nothing burger to a company as big as Bungie: "One expansion wasn't well received, big whoop." But when you start to unpack the situation, and remember that Destiny is Bungie's only active game franchise, and that their next game Marathon has been pushed back to 2025 at the earliest and that Destiny is hard-designed to reject new comers to the franchise has roughly as possible so it's imperative they keep the players that they have. Then the concerns start to make a little more sense. If an multi-year developed expansion that was supposed to carry the game for at least 12 months ended up burning out the player base, then Bungie will fill every hit to their only income source being drained. The Executives might have to start diving into the Scrooge McDuck money vault in order to pay for the second Swedish Villa that houses their third family and the maid who is secretly also their fourth mistress. Nah, can't have that- gotta start axing people. It's the only way!

When taking a brief glance over the laid-off staff you'll notice another depressingly familiar trend- a lot of the people gone are exactly the kind of people management would be targeting, and exactly who you don't want gone from a franchise you're trying to revivify. So yes, we're seeing senior talent, the woman responsible for the Halo logo and... wait, no. There's no way! Michael Salvatori? The Michael Salvatori is gone? Okay, I need to preface this bit quickly. Through all my times with Destiny, during the worst of the worst when the original game forced me out of playing the online and held a gun to it's head with a £50 bribe fee- when I swore off the game and jeered at it's descent into mediocrity throughout the long life of two- there was one aspect of Destiny I could never so much as frown at. One gratis so unbelievably brilliant in it's conception, execution and, yes, composition- that I've kept both game's soundtrack on my phone for years now despite never playing them. It's the music, obviously. Destiny's music is cinematically sublime, deserving of a better game to serve alongside. And now it's gone. Vanquished. Caput. Because Michael Salvatori was it's composer.

And to be clear, as far as anyone can tell this isn't a situation of Michael volunteering retiring out of solidarity to his axed colleagues- during the one email exchange we've seen, Salvatori offered his heart to all those that had been let go 'As well'. All this happening whilst their next expansion, the Final Shape, has gone back into emergency development after the recent internal review process only 'whelmed' testers. Bungie staff are terrified that the next expansion is going to cement them down the path losing touch with their piggy banks- I mean fans- and yet they're in the midst of ripping out the heart of the franchise along the way. Staff who understand the game, artists who breathed life into the game, they probably would have sacked Lance Reddick if the man hadn't passed away first. (He'd probably be too expensive!)

After the Sony acquisition things were supposed to be different. Staff were promised that management would fight to make sure they all kept their jobs and that no one would be culled by the Sony scythe in some vapid attempt to assert dominance over the studio. And for what it's worth they were right, Sony never got the chance to start chopping off Studio heads because apparently this is all Bungie Management's doing alone! So all of that scummy 'cutting people off at the very last day before their health insurance coverage runs out' and 'scheduling job cutting meetings the very morning of the event so that no one could prepare'. Or how about 'Letting staff go so that they aren't entitled to options'. That was performed by people who knew their victims. They probably recognised the faces of those they were throwing in the gutter to step over, maybe even met their families, maybe even played enough mental gymnastics about in that warped vacant cage of twisted blackened steel they call the seat of their soul to call themselves their 'friends'. Yet this is how they treated them.

This is an increasingly common story in the games industry currently, even as profits are soaring to untold degrees, cost cutting measures are being made at the slightest set-back and it's getting enough to put everyone on edge as the illusion we call 'job security' is starting to show it's arse. And here's a little   secret: putting artists on edge is not the best way of getting great work out of them... okay, that's not entirely true, a little bit of pressure is exactly what they need: but making them constantly terrified that they're going to lose everything at any moment is certainly not a 'little bit of pressure'. We're heard the doomsayers call about the impending video game crash for a while now, but I don't think that's where we headed. I think we're headed for a slow dissolution of the AAA class as more and more devs peel away into indie studios or into more secure industries altogether, and the when the studios lose all the people they need to keep up their death march development pace and start eating their own tails in order to stay alive, those cold-blooded creepy crooks will have no one to blame but their own rat-ridden 'ideals'.