On October 30th, 2023, Bungie laid off 8% of it's workforce. This amounted to around 100 people that got a notice in the morning, via email and a quick team meeting, that they no longer were employed and were getting two to three months worth of severance. News trickled out rapidly that the flagship game for Bungie, Destiny 2, was not performing well. Their last major update, called "Last Light", was generally not received well by the playerbase. Bungie revealed that they missed their Quarter 3 targets by 45% and that the pre-order numbers for their upcoming update, "The Final Shape", were far below their expectations. Paul Tassi of Forbes magazine revealed via interviews that had Sony no acquired Bungie in 2022, the company may very well have gone under by now. Now there are players cancelling pre-orders and boycotting the game. What happened? My thought: Live Service games are dying.
2023 was a marquee year for video game consumers. Some of the best games ever made decided to all release in this one year. In now particular order:
- Baldur's Gate 3
- Armored Core 6
- Mario Wonder
- Resident Evil 4 Remake
- Hi-Fi Rush
- Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
and many more.
Game after game after game of exceptional quality released, all asking for $60 to $70 for a complete experience with vast majority of those games having no micro-transactions or being live service. This is what the public wants, and what they continue to want. Not to say live service games cannot exist and should not. They should and will continue to.
That said, the days of companies chasing the dollar in hopes that players will have their next "forever game" are over. Even when I worked on live service games, I knew this was not a permanent state of being. What's really sad is: ultimately, this is a good thing.
The games listed above have permanence. You can play them with friends. You can share experiences of them forever. Most of them even come on a form of physical media, so they exist as long as you own them. They also have endings.
Live Service games can have some of the above, but they always want more of you. More money, more time, more attention, more energy. More, More, More. Some people love this, and more power to them, honestly. In a world that reverts back to gaming in it's purest art form: a complete package that tries it's best to entertain you and can be enjoyed forever with your repeated playing of it increasing your skill set with it, that is what (in my opinion) more video game players desire.
Good Luck to Bungie in the future. I do know people at Bungie that were laid off out of nowhere, and I have some animosity to the company presently for this. It may fade with time. Maybe. Bungie created some of my favorite games (Halo: Reach and Halo: Combat Evolved), but those are permanent games. They are finished experiences. This isn't the present Bungie. I want to end this note with this thought: I have a physical copy of Destiny 2: Forsaken. Nothing, and I really do mean nothing, on that disc works anymore, the game has been updated and removed so much content that what was present in 2018 is not present in 2023.
Is that ok?
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