Composer Marty O' Donnell: Getting Bungie out of Microsoft was good. Not getting Microsoft out of Bungie was bad.
- Thread starter Fenton
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Hopefully Sony can sort out their issues. You cant compare management between MS, Activision, Bungie and Sony when it comes to games.
And then hopefully they can keep producing 90 scores in games…
www.metacritic.com
If they die, they die. Until then, as long as they make good games, I dont care what the story is. In reality, we play the game, we dont play the issues at studios or what journalists say. If it doesn't last, so be it. Till then, I couldn't care less, Sony is stepping in, let’s see if it works out.
And then hopefully they can keep producing 90 scores in games…
Destiny 2: The Final Shape critic reviews
Metacritic aggregates music, game, tv, and movie reviews from the leading critics. Only Metacritic.com uses METASCORES, which let you know at a glance how each item was reviewed.
www.metacritic.com
If they die, they die. Until then, as long as they make good games, I dont care what the story is. In reality, we play the game, we dont play the issues at studios or what journalists say. If it doesn't last, so be it. Till then, I couldn't care less, Sony is stepping in, let’s see if it works out.
Interesting.
Pete Parsons took over Bungie in 2016 when they were a single game studio with 400 employees.
Eight years later they're a two game studio with 850 employees and they just released arguably the best piece of Destiny content of all time in The Final Shape.
Feels like a " Two sides to every story" kinda situation.
Pete Parsons took over Bungie in 2016 when they were a single game studio with 400 employees.
Eight years later they're a two game studio with 850 employees and they just released arguably the best piece of Destiny content of all time in The Final Shape.
Feels like a " Two sides to every story" kinda situation.
Bungie went from 900 to 1400 during the Sony acquisition and failed to manage their revenues accordingly. One game to fund the development of four is reckless. Economic issues also make this exponentially worse.
Sony is the right partner to correct Bungie and the legend Marty honest about the situation. Probably accurate.
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Two sides to every story.
Pete Parsons said in his blog post that Bungie "started running in the red" sometime in 2023. That suggests Destiny 2 was making so much money that it was successfully supporting the ever growing Bungie studio the entire time. If we look at Steam metrics, Destiny goes through a 6 month rough patch starting in October 2023 to March 2024. This was likely the period where Destiny 2 could no longer sustain Bungies employee count.
I just don't think we can knock leadership too harshly when the score says (1 game studio, 400 employees) grows to (2 game studio, 850 employees) in an 8 year span. Why are we supposed to act like that isn't impressive?
The Bungie doom and gloomers never like bringing up that aspect of Pete Parsons tenure.
How much of what Martin says about microsoft corporate culture being terrible for game development is true and how much of it is just bitter angry dude with an axe to grind against a former employer who sacked him.
Sony is very good at managing their studios. I assume that it will take time to fix everything but Hermen and his team is putting some order there.
For the revenue they generate, specially when underperformed with Lightfall to the point of putting the studio finances in the red, maybe the amount of projects they had under development and the amount of people and hirings they had was too high.
So they moved a project to PS Studios, maybe cancelled or put in the fridge some others more they had incubating/ in very early stages, reduced redundancies of duplied jobs already made for them at SIE moving some people there and also scaling back their manpower, downsizing to be now slightly above where they were before the acquisition.
Now will focus mostly on their Destiny cash cow and their next release (which got record numbers on its announcement trailer), Marathon. And also seem to have improved something in the Destiny team because TFS was a big success, unlike Lightfall. Maybe related to changes in management.
Sounds they did some corrections -maybe Totoki got angry with their finances- and now have a more realistic, safer direction, not burning that much money having highly reducing their costs and having them focused on their safest projects/bets.
For the revenue they generate, specially when underperformed with Lightfall to the point of putting the studio finances in the red, maybe the amount of projects they had under development and the amount of people and hirings they had was too high.
So they moved a project to PS Studios, maybe cancelled or put in the fridge some others more they had incubating/ in very early stages, reduced redundancies of duplied jobs already made for them at SIE moving some people there and also scaling back their manpower, downsizing to be now slightly above where they were before the acquisition.
Now will focus mostly on their Destiny cash cow and their next release (which got record numbers on its announcement trailer), Marathon. And also seem to have improved something in the Destiny team because TFS was a big success, unlike Lightfall. Maybe related to changes in management.
Sounds they did some corrections -maybe Totoki got angry with their finances- and now have a more realistic, safer direction, not burning that much money having highly reducing their costs and having them focused on their safest projects/bets.
I assume a bit of both.
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I don’t hate on Parsons the way everyone else does. Good for him buying cars. Don’t put your hands in another man’s pocket as they say here…
But cutting Destiny composers for instance is something I have a problem with in particular.
Luke Smith’s idea of splitting destiny into a 3rd person pve game and a separate 3v3 PvP shooter… all of that is garbage. Parsons owns that too no? He greenlit them and his spending.
To some extent economic factors are to blame but management also has to mitigate that and it’s never pretty. And parsons has notoriously been a spreadsheet exec.
Does it work? Well it kinda has. As a Bungie fan for more than two decades… the reason to be optimistic about the Sony purchase is to correct these cyclical mistakes.
Destiny makes money. Now Bungie has to…
PS - Destiny is about to hit a new record low for engagement for the month on steam. And Helldivers is right there tracking even lower even with its new content drop.
There are reasons for this… this year’s episode model. Episode 1, which we are in now, is split into 3 acts … Well, the final act is the one with the content that would be exciting and we’re still waiting (I think it’s this week or next). It would need to pop the game back thru 100k. It could…. Episode 1 also is kinda meh… and you don’t expect this year to be rolling until Episode 3 happens months from now ( I believe this is the key issue with the game’s model and the need for change but that’s a separate post).
Which is why I’ve said August will be a rough month for Sony’s online games, because it’s likely Concord will be a flop.
There are reasons for this… this year’s episode model. Episode 1, which we are in now, is split into 3 acts … Well, the final act is the one with the content that would be exciting and we’re still waiting (I think it’s this week or next). It would need to pop the game back thru 100k. It could…. Episode 1 also is kinda meh… and you don’t expect this year to be rolling until Episode 3 happens months from now ( I believe this is the key issue with the game’s model and the need for change but that’s a separate post).
Which is why I’ve said August will be a rough month for Sony’s online games, because it’s likely Concord will be a flop.
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Sucks that Steam engagement and numbers are important for their platform and now involved with PS games lol
I would need to know more about the composer situation to feel confident enough to judge. I do know all my favorite musicians throughout the years start putting out bad music once they're in their late 40's and 50's. I think it's possible Bungies composers were both overpriced and weren't executing as well as they once were.
That said, I'm shocked Bungie didn't pursue a 3rd person, open world, co-op game after the success of Helldivers 2. I could see Bungie taking that framework and being crazy successful with a AAA, next gen spin on that formula.
I agree with your overall point that the incubation projects were clearly failures.
Marty has his own unique situation in regards to his departure as composer…
The music for Bungie games as a whole is a very, very important piece of the puzzle. Every year you look forward to each expansion’s orchestrations as much as the games content itself.
Michael Salvatori was also a Halo veteran composer and was part of the first big layoff. Bungie was still putting out banger tracks thru The Final Shape thanks the Salvatori and co… it is likely soundtracks will be now done thru Sony’s in-house composers or contractors… which is not so exciting since most in the industry pale in comparison to what Destiny consistently puts out. I’m willing to be optimistic but it’s hard to… music is important and most modern soundtracks lacking IMO. It is also possible they may come back for contracted work but it’s just handled different thru Sony… who the f**k knows at the moment.
Now, considering these were cost cutting, at the margin, ruthless spreadsheet lay-offs … projects in incubation like those cancelled used destiny resources to not be used in destiny proper and we lost some veterans because of it to keep those going to then cancel anyway. Sure; these musicians were probably expensive to keep on payroll year round but it’s part of the magic and worth the sacrifice.
I’m mostly indifferent to rest of the layoffs (because I don’t know what the effect is) but optimistic about the new direction as a whole. The damage is done and a new and better path needed. Like I said… I believe Sony is the right partner
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True, but all their incubation projects were years off anyway. That just seems like a surefire hit as I don't think Helldivers 2 executed on its brilliant idea very well.
Bobby Kotick moment.
Sometimes people just prefer to have a great sailor who beats them up once in a while, than a nice but awful one.
Kind of a toxic relationship thing.
IMO there's a limit to which a company that makes creativity driven products can be run by a spreadsheet.
Bungie and many others are running into that limit pretty hard.
Spreadsheets don't usually take into account cultural changes well enough nor fast enough. I'd guess the spreadsheet guy is partially responsible for demanding e.g. LGBTQIA checklist overrepresentation amongst the NPCs throughout the DLCs' campaign to get cheaper loans, without even considering how the actual creatives tend to get tired of being told how to do their jobs and leave eventually.