Unfortunately this is just the norm when a company buys another. I give props to the employees thinking it is still Bungie, but it’s not. The second that deal was finalized they became sony employees, and even if on paper they were still Bungie they were always going to become Sony employees.
But business swallows little business. And big business doesn’t care about the jobs it leaves behind, or the people. Bungie as we knew it is dead
This isn’t a case of Sony just “swallowing” a little business. As the article states Bungie board of directors is 2 people from Sony and 3 people from Bungie, which means that while Sony technically owns Bungie the Bungie leadership still makes decisions about how to run the company. Supposedly there’s an obligation on Bungie’s part to meet certain financial goals. If Bungie meets those goals Sony can’t take over the company.
The problem is that Bungie isn’t doing well financially. The Sony takeover is an outcome of Bungie not being able to stay financially independent. That means if Bungie wasn’t under Sony then under the same conditions Bungie would most likely go bankrupt instead.
Bungie as we know it being dead has nothing to do with Sony. Bungie management has essentially killed Bungie.
Yes on paper that’s how it’s all laid out. However anyone who has been through a buyout knows that no parent company intends for the child company to act separately indefinitely. The shotgun clause in there saying they have to do well financially proves it to me. What company hasn’t gone through hard times before? Sony may be playing the long game but they’ll get control eventually, they always knew they would. It was inevitable that this would happen. Guarantee it was written this way probably with projections on when it would likely happen.
Which is why I say as soon as a buyout occurs the old company is gone. The cool culture you had, the lenient bosses, the small company style benefits? Gone. It may take a bit, but they’re going away. Papa business is here and he only cares about the profit margin, not the people, not even the product. They may say it’ll stay the same, but drip by drip the company will change, and a few years later you’ll realize you aren’t working for that cool smaller company anymore, you’re working for the big corpos conglomerate.
I get being pessimistic especially since we don’t know the details of Sony Bungie deal. But I think you’re not aware how bad it’s going at Bungie. Bungie has a huge burn rate according to Microsoft (they also tried to require Bungie and that was brought up as the biggest risk). Bungie missed their own revenue projections by 45%. When the layoffs happened some of the employees were told that the studio would be in great jeopardy if they were still independent.
Everything we know is pointing at Bungie possibly going bankrupt, if they were still independent. Sony swooping in is just Sony trying to save their 3,6 billion investment.
And I’m not sure why you’re trying to paint a small tight-knit company of Bungie? They have 1000+ employees even after the layoffs. The biggest criticism at Glassdoor is the horrible management. Bungie has been slipping into corporatism well before Sony.
It didn’t say in the article but why the hell are people sending threats? Knowing the types of gamers that send threats it’s probably a really fucking dumb reason, isn’t it?
Out of every esports event that could face issues I did not think anyone would be crazy angry about Nintendo. Did someone get blueshelled too many times in Mario Kart? I mean, what would drive people to get intense about Nintendo?
Smash (specially Melee) has always attracted questionable people. So if it had happened there I wouldn’t be surprised… but this is for Splatoon of all things.
Specially melee? When the fallout happened, it was significantly more ultimate personalities who were confirmed problematic, mainly due to the fact that someone younger is more likely to have been playing ultimate(melees an over a 20 year old game), which would lead to a higher chance of a negative interaction.
Splatoon also has some animosity towards nintendo as they were also behind the smash scene because they know that nintendo does not ultimately care about them, as caring about them leads to how Arms fizzled out.
Nintendo games might be very family friendly, but Nintendo as a company has a well-earned negative reputation in a lot of verticals including esports and community events.
The article doesn't clarify where the threats were coming from, so it may be for different reasons. And obv it doesn't justify harassing and threatening random employees though.
Threats are obviously not justifiable and are not okay but Nintendo has been earning a lot of badwill with gamers recently with their decisions to disallow small esport events. They have also aggressively copyright struck videos in the past that realistically just gave their awesome games free advertising but that’s not okay with them, etc
They seem to make a lot of really dumb business and especially community decisions despite making some incredible games. It’s not too surprising some people would feel burned with that.
Apparently Nintendo doesn’t let small esport competitions to take place. They want to be the only ones. But at the same time that’s just as dumb a reason to send threats as what you said lol. There is never a good reason to send threats regardless
I need to preface this by saying it’s really stupid that anyone’s sending threats, but I think the reason they’re doing it is because Nintendo has made a very hard-line stance against small esport events. You arent allowed to host events without their permission
Nintendo is my favorite gaming company, but man, their IP lawyers are absolutely vicious. Granted they’re also in Japan, the poster boy for a corporate-owned country (I lived there several years, no joke, if you think big corps run the US you ain’t seen nothing yet) which makes American IP law look like Chinese IP law, but even for a Japanese company, they’re brutal. What I find rather ironic about it is that a measure they took to protect their image and that of their brands from controversy over bad gamer behavior, led to bad gamer behavior directed at them. But either way, to these idiots sending threats, it’s a classic instance of “this is why we can’t have nice things”, ruining even the fun we were allowed to have for everyone and probably making it even less likely that Nintendo will reverse their policy.
Gotcha. I can see why people are upset. But threats? I guess I was right in thinking it was a dumb reason. Nintendo can go fuck themselves for sure. But at the same time if you are the type of person to send threats over trivial bullshit you are still a garbage human.
Remember when people started sending death threats to the CDPR over the Cyberpunk delays? People had been spending way too long sucking Witcher 3’s dick so they automatically though CP2077 was gonna be the next game of the decade.
Threats are never justified, but I do see why they did it. “If we cant do it, you cant either” is a pretty common mentality, and this is a surefire way to completely shut down the official events.
The worst bit is now, if nintendo caves at all and pulls back their draconian behavior, these people will count it as a victory achieved via threats and likely encourage their use elsewhere.
Depending on your definition of “unofficial”, nothing. But at some point you need to make media to tell people about your tournament, or you want to stream the tournament, and doing either of those without using Nintendo’s copyrighted material/trademarks is impossible.
Imagine buying your freedom from Microsoft only to get acquired by Sony a decade later. I think hindsight being 20/20 they may have just been better off continuing on with Microsoft.
Edit: I’d like to revise my previous position. This is why all devs and studio employees should follow the trend and UNIONIZE IMMEDIATELY.
Under Phil I think they’d be allowed a level of creative freedom but I can’t blame them for wanting to leave under Mattrick; he would have kept them on the Halo hamster wheel forever.
Yeah, I totally understand that. I suppose I am biased because I only played the first Destiny game, and to be honest it just always struck me as the Disney Star Wars version of Halo. It just lacked the compelling story elements and refinement of the early Halo games to me, so even back then I wondered if it was worth it for Bungie to separate from Microsoft.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out that’s for sure. This smells to me like an attempt to lock Destiny in as a Sony exclusive perhaps. So, the irony is that exactly what Bungie was trying to avoid in large part by splitting from Microsoft may end up happening anyway…
Their fate is even sadder in my view, they’re now the live service aid studio. Hopefully Jim Ryan’s replacement can fix that because churning out live service games sounds like a horrible idea
Yeah, Sony gave Bungie a pretty sick deal. Bungie gets financial backing from Sony and if Bungie doesn’t drive itself into the ground they keep their autonomy, and I guess the main benefit Sony got is/was live service expertise from Bungie (which is what Sony was focusing on when they acquired Bungie). The fact that Sony might need to step in is all on Bungie and it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been keeping up with Bungie. The short gist is that the entire company is horribly mismanaged and that’s why they had to lay off and are likely to get taken over by Sony.
And if I’m being honest, I think Sony takeover might be the best thing for Bungie (assuming it doesn’t get entirely dissolved). Get rid of the shit management and then, once you’ve put some reasonable people at the helm, let them do their own thing again.
When Destiny started, Bungie was tied to Activision and whenever there were design decisions people hated, they blamed Activision for them.
Then Destiny 2 launched, Bungie was able to buy out the Activision contract, and everything went to shit.
Turned out, Activision had been the voice of reason the whole time.
Bungie started eliminating story missions, vaulting content people had paid for, including a full 1/2 of the base game and multiple expansions. They sunset gears and weapons people spent hundreds of hours earning and curating because they claimed they didn’t know how to develop scenarios for them any more.
A full Sony takeover would be a huge improvement over what Bungie has done since separating from Activision.
So…Bungies leadership is worried that Sony will completely take over, so they’re making it into a dumpster fire?
That’ll only mean that Sony will take over and fire the Bungie executives making these decisions, giving them generous severance packages on top of all the bonuses they’ll give themselves for cutting costs…wait, I think I figured it out.
If Bungie falls short of certain financial thresholds by too great an amount, Sony is allowed to dissolve the existing board and take full control of the company.
Also the article mentions the board being split 50/50 between Sony and Bungee, with 1 tie breaker. So I don’t think they’re trying to hand it over to Sony when they could’ve just done that at any stage without a convoluted scheme.
The industry did this to itself, and while i cannot imagine the pain and stress of working 80hrs+ and hitting dead lines…no one pulled the brakes on the train, covid revealed how absolutely deficit heavy the gaming community was operating under. this happened once before, history isn’t repeating but its dropping and spitting hell fire rap bars
Destiny 1 was an amazing shooter I spent far too much of my life playing.
Destiny 2 was an amazing experience as well…
For the first two years.
I have no idea why they thought they could get away with milking the Light Grind forever. Or why they didn’t add better Guild support if they wanted to just turn it into a subscription MMO.
There was plenty great about Destiny, the problem is that eventually Bungie just stopped giving a shit about making a good game and focused on milking Destiny for everything they can. Like their biggest changes to gameplay they’ve done in the last 3 years is to fix the issues they themselves created on prior years. Those fixes are presented as some new cool feature when in reality they’re things they should’ve iterated upon when it was originally introduced.
For instance with armor 2.0 they added armor affinities that would indicate what kind of mods(armor perks) you can use. Dnd then each piece also needed to be upgraded to be able to fit mods into the armor. So not only did you have limited amount of mods you could have you also needed 3 different versions of an armor piece (ideally with a good statline) to fully take advantage of the new build system. They also introduced the artifact which was supposed to be horizontal progression but it contained seasonal mods that you would have to use within the new armor 2.0 system. So you would have to compromise between using seasonal mods vs non-seasonal armor mods.
The biggest feedback they got was that the system is too restrictive and some of the solutions they got was a) get rid of armor affinity and b) make artifact mods into artifact perks. Guess what they introduced this year as a part of their grand plan to shake up the game? Getting rid of armor affinity and turning artifact mods into perks (though they still somewhat act like mods), 3 years after the community told them to do it. And with it they created a new problem for them to fix down the line. They scrapped all the existing armor mods they created in the last 3 years and replaced them with the most uninteresting mods.
And what about the core gameplay loop? That has largely stayed the same for the last, well some would argue since the start of D2. Every activity for the last 3 years has been a variation of stand at a specific place, shoot at a specific thing, carry something from a to b, throw a ball or insert collected things. And obviously shoot mostly the same enemies you’ve been shooting for the past decade.
In short the game is stale and it’s because Bungie has focused on keeping the content treadmill running rather than actually improving the game.
Looks like some c-level dweeb or scab sympathizer downvoted your comment. I couldn’t agree more with your assessment. Bungie leadership is pretty much miserable assholes these days. It sucks for the developers who do the actual work and are trying to tell leadership what will actually fix the company. They don’t deserve any of the frustrations from any of the player base, but the executives can fuck themselves with splintered balsa wood for all I care.
whether or not this happens I hope somebody cleans house on the suits. they seems to be trying to run the company without an ounce of self awareness that they are steering the ship onto the rocks
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Aktywne