We are about to hit July and Destiny 2 fans are still mourning the death of the game , which frankly, will probably go on for years with the IP now in perpetual limbo. Players have cycled through the stages of grief about five times now, and it’s still going, but one refrain is how could this have happened? How could a series this big and beloved be killed off like this?

It’s a complicated question until…it isn’t. There are cases you could make about why Sony shouldn’t have done this, or Marathon’s role, or this and that, and while those are worth discussing, the end result is relatively simple. It’s not Sony’s “revenge” against Bungie, it’s not the game’s quality tanking, it’s able to be summed up in two sentences from one of my sources, one with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity, The simple, still-maddening explanation:

  • Because of the enormous scale of content that had to be produced nonstop, lest fans revolt against its scarcity, Destiny was only very rarely profitable during its entire lifespan.
  • When Destiny was profitable, those extra funds were often immediately misused by leadership at the time, funneled into way too many simultaneous incubation projects or ideas like spending tens of millions on a new, unneeded 208,000 square foot headquarters.

That’s pretty much the long and short of it. Few games, if any, produced the amount of content as frequently as Destiny did over the years, particularly Destiny 2 once it got fully into the non-stop seasonal/expansion model. When the game tried to drastically reduce content to cut costs, as we just saw with the Year of Prophecy, fans bolted (understandably).

There is past reporting that expansions like Lightfall and The Final Shape missed sales expectations, sometimes by significant amounts, but those expectations were set in the first place because of the enormous cost of those projects. Of course, that may have been unrealistic, as saying The Final Shape needed to do 50% higher than the record numbers it did put up was never going to happen.

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This also encompasses the “bad leadership” portion of all this, something fans usually, or often explicitly, blame for the current situation. In a sense that’s true, as rather than continually being reinvested in Destiny , the profits were used for bizarre projects like a sprawling HQ in the COVID era, or herded into too many other incubation projects. That spread everything thin and almost everything was canceled or never greenlit in the first place. Yes, a lot of that went to Marathon , as it was the only game to make it to release, but it was a broader issue with the studio's focus. Too many cooks, too many pots, and Destiny often suffered from its “wins” immediately being gobbled up and regurgitated elsewhere.

This leads to the Destiny 3 of it all. It does seem wrong to completely abandon an enormous IP like this, in a way we have almost never seen with a series this long-running. But AAA game costs have now ballooned so high in recent years, and Destiny was already so pricey, Sony just doesn’t want to gamble. It still wants to invest in the live space, the cheaper live space, though, of course, you can still lose hundreds of millions doing that too, as we’ve seen. A new Destiny game would sell, if nothing else.

It is upsetting, but not conspiratorial. High cost, poor decisions. And it’s unclear if either of those is going to change on Sony or Bungie’s side going forward.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy .