In an internal town hall meeting addressing a Monday round of layoffs that impacted multiple departments, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons allegedly told remaining employees that the company had kept “the right people” to continue work on Destiny 2.
Man, how about you rather try to not make the game an insufferable grind fest. I love the gameplay so much, but each time I decide to log back in and give it another go it doesn’t take long before that fun layer is peeled back and I see the grind lurking underneath.
the grind keeps attach rate though, it’s no good for them if you log in, have fun, do the stuff and log out again for six months
this is what all these GaaS are based around, I gotta grind this magical stick, I gotta grind Diamond, I gotta grind this battlepass or I’m losing money!
Honestly if I could play all of the game without having to grind like a fucking mad man, I’d probably regularly buy expansions and pay for a season pass.
I love the coop. I love the gunplay. I love most of the game except the grind.But I have kids and real life shit to do. I tried getting back into it during witch queen, but the amount of time I had to spend daily on it made it damn near impossible to play the dungeons and stuff. I had a little extra free time when I did that too. By the time I managed to hit the cap, I realized I was not having any fun doing it. So I quit. Had a clan I liked chatting and playing with. It was cool. But I’m just not going to keep paying for and playing a game that just feels like a tedious as fuck job.
sure, so here’s the reality check.
you aren’t profitable to these GaaS companies, you have kids and real life shit to do. you aren’t gonna bring them in money.
The people bringing in the money do the grind. it’s what all these GaaS games are. I too would enjoy if these studios made traditional games that are made to be enjoyable rather than made to keep attach rates up. but that’s not what they set out to make.
That’s because they’re only making games for the whales who grew up thinking they have to be constantly unlocking a battle pass to have fun.
The game used to just be fun.
Now we only gave the indies making new ideas.
I hate grind, but I used to enjoy just playing D2 weekly, way beyond the weekly content.
Then they decided that literally everything needed to be a slog, and that being overpowered was bad, and they ruined my fun. I went from 80 hr weeks (I know this isn’t healthy) to 1 hour weeks over the course of a couple seasons. I still spent a lot of time after the launch of the latest DLC, but after that was done, and they upped the base difficulty by removing the effect of levels on almost all base content, I struggled to stay engaged. This season, I just gave up. I’ve got like 15 levels, when I usually have 200-300 in the battle pass.
I’m not saying they don’t have a grind problem, too, but it wasn’t what killed it for me.
It’s fucking ridiculous that CEO’s make decisions that make players dislike a game or product yet the workers are the ones getting laid off. I doubt any of the regular employees had a say in the shitty DLC decisions.
Now I will say that a game company maybe doesn’t need 1100 employees. That’s just intuitively oversized, at least to me.
That being said, I cannot imagine a substantial amount of money, that could trivially uphold those jobs, is being wasted on middle management positions which will not be part of these layoffs (of course, they never are), bonuses and C-suite yachts. Plus, the company had no game release sind 2017, maybe not performing too well financially is, well, expected? That is, certainly the wise CEO put significant sums of money from the highly successful early years of Destiny 2 aside to easily cushion the leaner years later instead of blowing it all on cocaine and hookers, right? Otherwise, why would someone keep that management around that cannot even do something as simple as cushioning money? Right? 😑
I hate how this never affects the people who are actually responsible for the losses. You never get the C’s sued to take the bonuses back they got blown up their arses. You never get all the excessive layers of middle management removed. No, they always let go of the actual workers, who could do fuck all to prevent it to begin with.
Destiny 2 has overperformed for years. If they couldn’t see the playerbase getting less happy with paying ridiculous sums for seasonal DLC I don’t know what to tell them. Everyone who’s even casually played could have told you this.
D2 has made most of the money it’s going to at this point. There are no new players.
I can’t imagine new players playing the game. I tried getting back in after missing most of the events since the 2nd dlc came out. So much of the story is gone now because they were only part of the event and inaccessible now. Doesn’t even feel like the same game when I went back to it. Tried watching a 2 hour lore video for all the things that happene but that didn’t help.
There are new players… We just brought another on last month… It’s really not that bad. The new light stuff has actually been worked into a pretty nice onboarding experience.
There’s a couple here and there, it’s not like new players have completely stopped joining, but there’s not that many. I’d guess fractions of a percent of the playerbase have started in the last year.
The new light onboarding really was abysmal when I went through it earlier this year (few months before light fall) and the only reason I made it as far as I did was my brother who has thousands of hours in the game. If it was just me I wouldn’t have made it more than a few hours in before being overwhelmed with too much
There’s a couple here and there, it’s not like new players have completely stopped joining, but there’s not that many.
That’s typical when you hit market saturation/have an established game. Look at wow or RuneScape. The revenue comes from the people already playing your game.
The new light onboarding really was abysmal when I went through it earlier this year
You should’ve seen it before beyond light launched.
“Go shoot that, now that, now that. I’m so glad you’re back guardian. Welcome to the tower.”
My friends and I started without anyone to pull us through that mess, and we figured out what to do with Google and just clicking on things. We’ve since grown to a group of like 10ish, but yeah … Like newer people don’t really get what it was like before. It’s not great, but it’s gotten better.
The CEO has to go because they failed to deliver? Right? I mean that’s why they get paid so much, to take responsibility. Now they will face the consequences of their failure! No?
