Comment by sylens | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sylens | Hacker News Reader

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> In comparison: Sony paid 20x less for Bungie. What they lack in variety of products, they make up for in, in my view, Potential. Destiny is a great franchise, with lots of fans. The team brings rock solid FPS dev & netcode experience (something Sony's first party studios are at a deficit for).

I disagree. Destiny may have once had potential, but Bungie is a studio that continually shoots itself in the foot. Just like with Halo, they threw out years of work for the first Destiny and essentially stitched together a frankenstein of the parts to ship on time. It's why the story has never made sense, even as they try to retcon various pieces to fit into a much longer narrative.

The game has also lost some of its early "looter shooter with friends" charm and become a grindfest that feels like a job at times, with content that is sunset only 2-3 years after it is sold to consumers. Destiny 2 is also extremely hostile to new players, bombarding them with dozens of vendors, currencies, and no clear sense of where to start and how to begin grokking the story. The original campaign has been sunset so if you never played before, you will be missing the equivalent of the first movie of a trilogy in terms of plot and characters.

My hope for this acquisition is that it lets them course correct the design of whatever they do next because I feel that Destiny 2 is in decline.

To actually finish all the content in each D2 expansion you have to invest full time job kind of time in it.

Destiny doesn't just feel like a job, in some sense it IS a job.

I thought they did a good job rehabilitating the first game from the sorry shape it shipped in (see: the economics of the loot cave). It is a mountain which can be climbed, and it is fun to do so. (There is also a literal mountain to climb)

The child in me always kneejerk reacts "not my Bungie!". How much of the Destiny trainwreck was publisher fingering? Could the Bungie of 10 years ago have put out a game that is fun, like they had consistently for the previous decade? Of course, it was just those pesky publishers.

Well, now the Bungie of yore is thoroughly dead. All of the faces from the Halo Vid Docs have moved on. What's left is a husk. Sony bought a hope. They also prevented Microsoft and Bungie from teaming up again. Perhaps they fear that duo. I wish them the best.

They've continued some of their worse monetisation and game design decisions while independent for quite a few years now, and stuff like the poor value of the 30th anniversary pack is entirely their own mistake to make, so I feel publisher meddling was a handy deflection for Bungie to hide behind in many cases.

> They've continued some of their worse monetisation and game design decisions while independent for quite a few years now, and stuff like the poor value of the 30th anniversary pack is entirely their own mistake to make...

This is an interesting thought. The 30th anniversary *paid* content was a bit lighter than anticipated, however the Free To Play content that came alongside it was fantastic. Perhaps I'm just used to seeing phrases like 'worse monetization' from the consumers perspective rather than the business's, but most of the community reactions from the 30th were positive, at least in regards to what was paid and what wasn't.

A truism about Destiny: there's always people, both people who play the game and who don't, talking tons of trash about it.

Personally I've gotten far more value than I've paid for out of everything I've ever bought in Destiny, including the 30th pack. I've even bought a few expansions twice. That said we are lucky enough to be in tech. And there were a lot of people complaining about the 30th pack before it launched, though those seem to have quieted down by now.

Is the associated content free to play? I thought it was tied to the seaason pass. In which case the 30th anniversary content is stuff that would have been in the season pass anyway in prior expansions, and that double dipping is worse for consumers than previous. If it just requires owning the game or just beyond light, that is an improvement to be fair.

Free to play:

1. dares of eternity

2. Xûr bounties and rewards

3. 11 weapons

Pay $25:

1. forerunner (exotic sidearm)

2. grasp of avarice (dungeon)

3. ship / sparrow

4. four emotes

5. two full sets of universal ornaments

6. one extra helmet ornament

7. Gjallerhorn

All cosmetics except for Forerunner (which has already dropped to #71 in Trials and has no pve relevance) and the Dungeon, which is the one most people were up in arms about.

EDIT: oh, and edited above: I forgot about Gjallerhorn, haha. It requires the dungeon and so therefore is for pay too. It's very good but still not clearly meta, we'll see if rockets are great next season like many people suspect.

> "not my Bungie!"

Pathways into Darkness and Marathon forever.

I hear they started making non-Macintosh games recently?

I grabbed Destiny 2 and some expansions a while back on a humble bundle. I had a blast, it was fun and could play with friends. Then end game seemed to not have much going for it. And it was confusing on what you could and couldn’t access. Came back to it after a break and with more expansions out it just seemed even more confusing on what I could and couldn’t access. It’s sort of the WOW problem, the game is just overwhelming. There is so much content and no clear way on what you can or can’t access. The various currencies alone are confusing.

I've got 2500 hours in the last two years, and yes, this is one of the biggest issues with the game. You really need a group of friends to walk you through it all. I've been doing so with some folks, and it's a ton of fun, but if you're solo, the experience is far worse.

Generally agree, but on the other hand, the game feels a LOT better since since the Activision divestment.

In the last 12 months narrative team of Destiny 2 have REALLY knocked it out of the park, with the seasonal plot actually making sense and having some interesting activities (like Battlegrounds). Some significant improvements in QoL too.

While there definitely gaps as you say - the New Light experience in particular needs some serious work - so long as Sony lets the team continue on its current trajectory, there may be hope.

I agree that the seasonal storytelling is better but they have a very real problem with the game becoming Bounty Collector. They also have basically abandoned Crucible, which makes me think the new IP is where all their top PvP talent is currently.

It has been rough out there for the crucible but improvements are coming: https://twitter.com/joegoroth/status/1422951524649500678

https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1488499142221512705

| 860,000 players played Destiny 2 yesterday, at a slow point in a season about to end later this month

| • 275,000 on Xbox | • 355,000 on PlayStation | • 224,000 on Steam | • 5,390 on Stadia

Destiny is not small.

There are maybe a dozen or so western service-games with 1M+ regular active players.

* Microsoft bought maybe four with the AB acquisition (CoD, Hearthstone, WoW, Overwatch, maybe D3 but probably not), and had one coming in (Minecraft. H:I qualifies for now, but its new and it remains to be seen if it has staying power).

* Valve owns two (CSGO, Dota2). They're extremely not for sale.

* Riot owns at least two (LoL/Valorant). Also not for sale; owned by Tencent.

* EA has a couple (Apex, maybe their sports titles as well). Likely out of reach for anyone to acquire.

* Epic, of course, has Fortnite.

* Rockstar has GTA5. T2 is probably on the acquisition block; expect that next, but who the buyer will be is anyone's guess. My pocket prediction is actually Epic.

To clarify: The reason why I narrowed that list to just western companies is because of the difficulty in both determining metrics for eastern games, and the difficulty in acquiring them. Chinese companies simply won't be acquired, and something many may not know: its very, very difficult for non-japanese companies to acquire japanese companies. There's a lot of government rules restricting it. PUBG is South Korean though, so it may qualify for the list; less familiar with SK's stance on western acquisitions.

Tangential: this is why you should laugh anyone out of the room who suggests Microsoft will buy FromSoftware. From is a fascinatingly weird company; owned by a Japanese multinational that mostly publishes manga & tabletop roleplaying games, to my knowledge From is Kadokawa's only video game subsidiary. On the one hand, they're a perfect acquisition for Sony given that Sony is Japanese and From is a weird company among Kadokawa's MO. On the other hand, its a massive profit center that I'm certain their overlords leave to their own devices.

That's essentially everything in the current gaming landscape. Once its all laid out, it should be obvious how valuable Destiny is to Sony: PlayStation isn't on that list. They do own something like 3-5% of Epic, but beyond that, they're seeing Microsoft make heavy investments in both discrete releases & ongoing service games. Sony has discrete releases MASTERED; they're the king, up there with Nintendo. But they don't have service games. To get a service game like Destiny, in a super popular genre (looter shooter RPG), for a couple billion, is a steal; even moreso that it gives them a card to play, maybe first, maybe second, if Microsoft ever moves to remove Call of Duty from PlayStation; its nuclear peace. Remember: Sony collects 30% of every CoD transaction on PlayStation. View the acquisition through this lens, and it adds further value to the transaction: if the threat of removing Destiny from Xbox, and thus Xbox's 30% cut of transactions there, keeps CoD on PlayStation a bit longer, it helps pay for itself.

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