Activision says "Destiny 2" is underperforming, what's happening now?

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Activision shares are again down after a less optimistic earnings call that has dealt with many issues, but which has been more marked than most others. Call of Duty sales are relatively flat, Diablo Immortal attracted a lot of reaction from the fans, but Activision specifically called Destiny 2: Abandoned as underperforming his expectations.

"Some of our other franchises like destiny do not work as well as we would like, "was the exact quote, followed by the promise of creating more content and looking for other forms of monetization." We have not yet seen the complete reintegration of the nucleus. destiny"Said Coddy Johnson, COO of Activision," which has resulted in underperformance compared to expectations so far. Some players are in "wait and see" mode. If you are in it, you are deeply committed. Otherwise, we think the time has come to bring the players back. "

Although this is not good news for current players "deeply engaged", most of them would agree that destiny This is the best place he has been after Forsaken, this is not the case. this a lot of surprise, given the recent developments. It took a month for Bungie to integrate Forsaken into her other DLC passport, which was a barrier for many. Then last week at the BlizzCon, it was announced that Destiny 2 would be free to download and keep in the next two weeks on PC. These are not signs of a super healthy game.

So what's going on here? And what happens next? Both questions are long and complicated, but since I've written long and complicated destiny articles, let's go.

Much of Forsaken's failure is due to the launch of Destiny 2 himself, who spent the first six months of his life is relatively useless with problems in both the vanilla launch and in the first rather bad DLC, Curse of Osiris.

Even though I say that Activision's punitive contract "you have to publish huge extensions / suites every fall" is partly to blame, with Destiny 2 not taking enough time in the oven, I can not claim that Bungie also did not make some bad decisions. Activision did not require them to make duplicate primaries or expendable shaders, or to create a mediocre end of play, all of which were fundamental problems with D2 at launch.

Destiny 2 Warmind, his second DLC launched in the spring, did not really start to improve significantly, but by that time, many players had fled. And the problem with destinyThe model is this: when you arrive at Forsaken, an extension of content that almost everyone accepts is quite fantastic, destiny is set up requires that players possess Destiny 2, The curse of Osiris and Warmind even to start playing Forsaken. Yes, Bungie has come up with $ 60 worth of contracts and has finally made the season free of free downloadable content, but often it's as much a psychological barrier as a financial problem. Players simply feel too late to return to Destiny 2and even if Bungie has items that can propel you to the appropriate power level to start Forsaken, many players A) do not know it and B) feel exhausted by destiny In the last four years it has not been as good as it is today.

The truth is that we are now entering what is essentially the fifth year of destiny with the launch of Forsaken, so no, I'm not at all surprised to see that many people have left school, no matter how good things are. The dead who walk has an incredible season 9, but after many missteps and nearly a decade of broadcasts, audiences are one-third of what they were. This is often how things happen.

Part of this may also be a problem related to the expectations of Activision, a company that does not feel like it can celebrate a first $ 500 million salvo. Black Ops 4 because it was not as much growth as they wanted to see it. We know that Forsaken has generated more digital revenue than any other stock on the market when it was launched in September, but it is still considered a failure. And despite all the complaints about the launch of Destiny 2 at the launch, it was still the third best-selling game of 2017, behind Call of Duty and NBA 2K. It seems possible that a series like destiny risk of never reaching the kind of high income targets that a megacorp like Activision has for it.

The problem of monetization is an interesting problem that will be extremely difficult to solve. destiny basically has the same problem that Diablo. How to monetize a looter so as not to harm his very function? destiny tried this with the Eververse store in the past, where its highlight was the release of Curse of Osiris while there were more new items in the Eververse store than the booty that could be found in the world at the time launch of the DLC.

Since then, complaints from fans have caused Eververse to lose its irrelevance. It still exists in the game. You can still buy some surprise boxes in the form of Bright Engrams, but you win them so often just by playing that there is virtually no reason to spend money on them. 39, money at Eververse, and holiday events that once designed to sell microtransactions yielded and allowed things like forbidding duplicates, so most players can easily assemble collections simply by playing. This is good news for the player, bad news for the income, and yet it's not like when Eververse was more greedy, it was better.

It's exactly the same thing that happened with Diablo, luckily destiny did not have to suffer as much as the auction house. The only downloadable content that really makes sense for destiny These are paid content extensions, but we know that they sell less and generate much lower revenues than, for example, battle passes or chests. I'm a little worried about this because Diablo 3, a game sold at about 30 million copies and the second extension was effectively canceled and split into a hodgepodge of free content, while Blizzard had never known how to monetize "correctly". Diablo 4 happens, but in a different effort to monetize intellectual property, well, that's how we have Diablo Immortal. In a parallel universe, I think that it was once destiny might have worked on a subscription MMO model such as WoW, although it is now completely excluded.

All this leads to a question: what is changing now if an expansion like that of Forsaken is a disappointment for Destiny & # 39;s lords?

I doubt that the plans for the second year (fifth year) are changed and that our three smaller content additions are always Black Armory, Joker's Wild and Penumbra, because their development is far too advanced to be modified. Although Forsaken did not sell well, I am not sure of my confidence in selling the annual pass. We may have another major expansion yet, although I doubt it is as big as Forsaken, similar to Rise of Iron.

After that? I am not sure. Even if the agreement between Bungie and Activision was to last a decade, I'm not sure we have the guarantee Destiny 3 at this point, and we know that Bungie is also starting to develop other games. I would say that despite the sales of DLC, Activision and Bungie would be crazy to give up destiny because it houses one of the most passionate and motivated fans of the game, and yet I just watched a faux pas of BioWare put essentially the same beloved Mass Effect series on the ice indefinitely.

I think the community can at least convey the message to Bungie that she should continue to do what she did in the Forsaken era: from tradition to content production, to play, to play is almost perfect (although destiny the community will always find Something to complain about). The problem is no longer a quality problem, but a marketing problem, which brings players back into the game. That's why you see things like this distributed for free on PC and PS Plus. As for monetization, this remains a difficult problem to solve. I've already suggested a ton of cosmetics that Bungie leaves on the table because they could sell character designs, new haircuts, face paints, and so on. I have suggested interiors of ships, where players could pay to expose their weapons and armor in some sort of performance room. But again, unless you're designing practically all of your game for the player to regularly spend money, Fortnite, Hearthstone, GTA Onlinethis kind of serious income generation will probably be forever elusive. Get a fraction of the base of players to pay a new story, the DLC is not enough for most companies nowadays, Activision included, leaving a game like destiny in a difficult place.

All I can do is continue to tell people "destiny It's good now, you should really try. "I do not work for Activision nor Bungie, but I love this series and I do not want to see it go away because of past mistakes and a greedy market model that seems to have no place. for that.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Read my new detective science fiction novel Herokiller, now available in print and online. I have also written The trilogy born of the earth.

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Activision shares are again down after a less optimistic earnings call that has dealt with many issues, but which has been more marked than most others. Call of Duty sales are relatively flat, Diablo Immortal attracted a lot of reaction from the fans, but Activision specifically called Destiny 2: Abandoned as underperforming his expectations.

"Some of our other franchises like destiny do not work as well as we would like, "was the exact quote, followed by the promise of creating more content and looking for other forms of monetization." We have not yet seen the complete reintegration of the nucleus. destiny"Said Coddy Johnson, COO of Activision," which has resulted in underperformance compared to expectations so far. Some players are in "wait and see" mode. If you are in it, you are deeply committed. Otherwise, we think the time has come to bring the players back. "

Although this is not good news for current players "deeply engaged", most of them would agree that destiny This is the best place he has been after Forsaken, this is not the case. this a lot of surprise, given the recent developments. It took a month for Bungie to integrate Forsaken into her other DLC passport, which was a barrier for many. Then last week at the BlizzCon, it was announced that Destiny 2 would be free to download and keep in the next two weeks on PC. These are not signs of a super healthy game.

So what's going on here? And what happens next? Both questions are long and complicated, but since I've written long and complicated destiny articles, let's go.

Much of Forsaken's failure is due to the launch of Destiny 2 himself, who spent the first six months of his life is relatively useless with problems in both the vanilla launch and in the first rather bad DLC, Curse of Osiris.

Even though I say that Activision's punitive contract "you have to publish huge extensions / suites every fall" is partly to blame, with Destiny 2 not taking enough time in the oven, I can not claim that Bungie also did not make some bad decisions. Activision did not require them to make duplicate primaries or expendable shaders, or to create a mediocre end of play, all of which were fundamental problems with D2 at launch.

Destiny 2 Warmind, his second DLC launched in the spring, did not really start to improve significantly, but by that time, many players had fled. And the problem with destinyThe model is this: when you arrive at Forsaken, an extension of content that almost everyone accepts is quite fantastic, destiny is set up requires that players possess Destiny 2, The curse of Osiris and Warmind even to start playing Forsaken. Yes, Bungie has come up with $ 60 worth of contracts and has finally made the season free of free downloadable content, but often it's as much a psychological barrier as a financial problem. Players simply feel too late to return to Destiny 2and even if Bungie has items that can propel you to the appropriate power level to start Forsaken, many players A) do not know it and B) feel exhausted by destiny In the last four years it has not been as good as it is today.

The truth is that we are now entering what is essentially the fifth year of destiny with the launch of Forsaken, so no, I'm not at all surprised to see that many people have left school, no matter how good things are. The dead who walk has an incredible season 9, but after many missteps and nearly a decade of broadcasts, audiences are one-third of what they were. This is often how things happen.

Part of this may also be a problem related to the expectations of Activision, a company that does not feel like it can celebrate a first $ 500 million salvo. Black Ops 4 because it was not as much growth as they wanted to see it. We know that Forsaken has generated more digital revenue than any other stock on the market when it was launched in September, but it is still considered a failure. And despite all the complaints about the launch of Destiny 2 at the launch, it was still the third best-selling game of 2017, behind Call of Duty and NBA 2K. It seems possible that a series like destiny risk of never reaching the kind of high income targets that a megacorp like Activision has for it.

The problem of monetization is an interesting problem that will be extremely difficult to solve. destiny basically has the same problem that Diablo. How to monetize a looter so as not to harm his very function? destiny tried this with the Eververse store in the past, where its highlight was the release of Curse of Osiris while there were more new items in the Eververse store than the booty that could be found in the world at the time launch of the DLC.

Since then, complaints from fans have caused Eververse to lose its irrelevance. It still exists in the game. You can still buy some surprise boxes in the form of Bright Engrams, but you win them so often just by playing that there is virtually no reason to spend money on them. 39, money at Eververse, and holiday events that once designed to sell microtransactions yielded and allowed things like forbidding duplicates, so most players can easily assemble collections simply by playing. This is good news for the player, bad news for the income, and yet it's not like when Eververse was more greedy, it was better.

It's exactly the same thing that happened with Diablo, luckily destiny did not have to suffer as much as the auction house. The only downloadable content that really makes sense for destiny These are paid content extensions, but we know that they sell less and generate much lower revenues than, for example, battle passes or chests. I'm a little worried about this because Diablo 3, a game sold at about 30 million copies and the second extension was effectively canceled and split into a hodgepodge of free content, while Blizzard had never known how to monetize "correctly". Diablo 4 happens, but in a different effort to monetize intellectual property, well, that's how we have Diablo Immortal. In a parallel universe, I think that it was once destiny might have worked on a subscription MMO model such as WoW, although it is now completely excluded.

All this leads to a question: what is changing now if an expansion like that of Forsaken is a disappointment for Destiny & # 39;s lords?

I doubt that the plans for the second year (fifth year) are changed and that our three smaller content additions are always Black Armory, Joker's Wild and Penumbra, because their development is far too advanced to be modified. Although Forsaken did not sell well, I am not sure of my confidence in selling the annual pass. We may have another major expansion yet, although I doubt it is as big as Forsaken, similar to Rise of Iron.

After that? I am not sure. Even if the agreement between Bungie and Activision was to last a decade, I'm not sure we have the guarantee Destiny 3 at this point, and we know that Bungie is also starting to develop other games. I would say that despite the sales of DLC, Activision and Bungie would be crazy to give up destiny because it houses one of the most passionate and motivated fans of the game, and yet I just watched a faux pas of BioWare put essentially the same beloved Mass Effect series on the ice indefinitely.

I think the community can at least convey the message to Bungie that she should continue to do what she did in the Forsaken era: from tradition to content production, to play, to play is almost perfect (although destiny the community will always find Something to complain about). The problem is no longer a quality problem, but a marketing problem that brings players back into the game. That's why you see things like this distributed for free on PC and PS Plus. As for monetization, this remains a difficult problem to solve. I've already suggested a ton of cosmetics that Bungie leaves on the table because they could sell character designs, new haircuts, face paints, and so on. I have suggested interiors of ships, where players could pay to expose their weapons and armor in some sort of performance room. But again, unless you're designing practically all of your game for the player to regularly spend money, Fortnite, Hearthstone, GTA Onlinethis kind of serious income generation will probably be forever elusive. Get a fraction of the base of players to pay a new story, the DLC is not enough for most companies nowadays, Activision included, leaving a game like destiny in a difficult place.

All I can do is continue to tell people "destiny It's good now, you should really try. "I do not work for Activision nor Bungie, but I love this series and I do not want to see it go away because of past mistakes and a greedy market model that seems to have no place. for that.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Read my new detective science fiction novel Herokiller, now available in print and online. I have also written The trilogy born of the earth.