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.
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
My heart goes out to the Bungie team. It’s a terrible feeling to have to rely on your job for a paycheck and healthcare and to have to endure the anxiety of thinking you’ll lose your job or benefits any day. Especially with the industry being in such turmoil right now. Dozens of gaming dev houses are laying off their staff and shuttering their doors, so it’s not like you can just pick up another job in the industry when veterans are competing for the small number of positions available.
While terrible, the most of these people make a lot of money and could have also unionized over the past years. Covid also showed them what was on the horizon. But instead the prevailing US worker strategy in these high paying jobs seems to be “get yours”.
Blames the workers for not leaving sooner, for not seeing it coming, for not unionizing, for making a decent living.
So you blame the victims of corporate greed instead of the corporations themselves.
Maybe you should consider keeping your opinions to yourself?
Bungie has show themselves to be a good employer for a decade or more. You can’t blame workers because the company was sold to Sony and now are being mistreated.
Corporate greed can only be stopped by disallowing the divide and conquer strategy they employ. Individual bargening against large corporations only works if the employer works in good faith. So when the relationship was good they could have also formed a union and work together to have a fair footing if anything changes in that good relationship. The employees as a group missed that window and now that it’s needed the framework for collective bargaining is not there and individuals are left holding the bag.
Unions should not be demonized as a bad thing or punishment for the employer, it is a counterweight to the corporate machine if it ever shows it’s ugly head. Good employers have nothing to fear if they work together.
@Tosti have you ever tried unionizing a workplace? Turns out it's actually pretty hard, especially when people know it's a million times safer to just go get a new job than get fired for union activism
Actually I successfully have, just not in the US. The US has pretty hostile regulations against unions. Or maybe lacks regulations against companies squashing them.
you’re not wrong, but you are being unnecessarily antagonistic, and i would appreciate it if you didn’t push people against unionizing by being antagonistic about it. it’s hard enough to get a union going without shaming people for not doing it sooner
people are already suffering at the hands of capitalism. you don’t need to throw it in their face. and, y’know, maybe some people from the game industry browse lemmy. it’s almost like they’re probably just people like the rest of us
I sort of get your point, but sometimes the truth also stings a little and people need to be aware that when it’s good is when you need to prepare for the downturn, that is the moment to prepare your nestegg, unionize etc.
As I said in the other comment, the Union has been villofied by corpo’s that people in the US think they are only to antagonize the company.
you can explain all of that and be nice about it, you don’t need to assume that people’s motivation is to “get theirs”. like you say, most people have grown up with several decades of propaganda, it’s not their fault they see unions as bad. it takes time to undo that stuff and it’s hard enough as it is without assuming their motivations or blaming them for something they had no control over
You seem to be making a mountain out of a molehill. Attacking the tone of the message adds nothing.
The “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” view of the world is something most Americans ascribe to. It might not apply to an individual but it definitely describes the group.
Yes years of corporate propaganda made an impact, I hope for them they can be the change they want to see.
it’s not a controversial take to say a message’s tone affects how it’s taken. could you explain why it’s so difficult for you to hear the request “could you be nice”?
or do you genuinely believe a message’s tone doesn’t affect how it’s received? because if so, i’ve been wasting a lot of effort on being nice to you, myself :p (that’s a joking tone, because it’s almost certainly not going to be obvious)
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
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.
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.
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.
Sadly I lost interest in the game once they decided to remove content I’d paid for.
Gutting to see the developers suffer like this as I doubt they’re the ones making the shit decisions but are the ones taking all the hits with the layoffs.
I had a Destiny poster on my wall back when all we knew was the name of the game and a bit of promotional art. We named our cat Bungie. So yeah, I’m pretty sad about the current state of things.
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