Destiny Moving Forward

As you are already probably aware, Bungie and Activision decided to go their separate ways, with Bungie retaining all rights to Destiny 2. In light of some recent security fraud suspicions on Activision’s part, this may have been a good move by Bungie. What does this mean for Destiny 2  though? Will Bungie be able to continue work on the title in a profitable manner without further alienating their audience?

Bungie is fortunate in that they are taking back sole ownership of the title at a time when it is doing fairly well. Now they are free to continue development for the title without any outside interference. However, unlike past titles from the developer, Destiny requires continual injections of capital in order to remain active. This means they have to find ways to get their players to be willing to pony up some cash without falling into the micro transaction trap that has doomed so many other games.

Micro transactions aren’t necessarily a bad thing. If done properly, it can mean a continued revenue stream to the developer to cover the cost of servers and maintenance. We can all agree that vanity items are fine, but Pay-to-Win is a bad business model, so avoiding that can help keep the servers up.

Combine that with periodic quality downloadable content and there is no reason why Bungie can’t keep this game going in a profitable manner for quite some time. The numbers may not be as high as the Activision share-holders would have liked, but they should be more than sufficient to allow Bungie to keep it going while allowing them to set some extra cash aside for future development of this and other titles.

Destiny is a great game and Bungie should be proud of their work. If you focus only on the game and not the cash-grab nonsense that has angered so many gamers, it is arguably some of Bungie’s best work to date. Now they have to make it their own and I have little doubt Bungie can pull it off. They already seem to be aware of the fact that if you want players to support your product, then all you have to do is make a great product, something Bungie has the capability of doing exceptionally well.