It is not exactly a secret that, in recent years, Destiny 2 hasn’t been doing so hot. Frequenters of the pseudo-MMO have found certain expansions and updates to be disappointing, and for a live service game a few too many disappointments can be devastating. Now, in a new interview, the game’s director Tyson Green has acknowledged how the game is struggling to bring in a new audience, and discussed the difficulties that come with that.
“For years now, Destiny has been on this steady hardening of the core [audience],” Green said, speaking to IGN. “More and more core players are staying and playing the game, but relatively few [new] people come into the game. There’s a tightening and contraction, and this presents problems for a game that you’re trying to maintain as a live service, especially when you want to keep serving those core players with great, compelling expansions.”
Part of the issue, Green thinks, is that Destiny 2’s expansion The Final Shape, which essentially wrapped up the main story Bungie had been working on nigh on a decade. They found that those that played it felt satisfied, but “the big [downwards] spike in population [came after]. That happened because we ended the saga. So you get what you pay for, right?”
Of course, as Green notes, from a business perspective this isn’t what they had planned, and he noted that they wanted to and want to keep working within the world of Destiny. “There are still lots of things to do, and we have to keep building the game. Unfortunately, it was not gracefully managed, but we had to try something.”
That something is the game’s new Fate saga, the latest addition of that being the Star Wars themed Renegades. I’m not a Destiny person myself, and I can tell you personally that has someone who has floated the idea of picking the shooter up, Star Wars does nothing for me (I think brand crossovers are the devil’s work, particularly in narrative-driven live service games), and just how much of the story is vaulted away makes it feel not particularly worth it either.
Perhaps slightly soberingly, Green also said that he thinks Bungie have “been taught a bunch of hard lessons about what our players want, and there are really two kinds of live games: those that listen to the players and respond, and those that don’t. And we don’t want to be a dead live game, we want to keep building Destiny.”
There are whispers from a source whose reputability I can’t quite determine, so take this with the tiniest pinches of salt, that Destiny 3 is in the works, but I am wondering if this isn’t the trump card Bungie may want it to be. And with Marathon as it is, well, Bungie can’t really afford to make any mistakes.
