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After laying off “most” of the Destiny team, Bungie is coming to players, hat in hand, with open acknowledgements of Marathon’s failures and new plans to keep Destiny 2’s legacy alive.
Studio head Poria Torkan and head of product Josh Deane have penned a contrite message about the studio’s future while asking players to hold Bungie “accountable” to its goals.
“This is an important time for Bungie,” Torkan and Deane say in a joint blog post. “Our future depends on making clear choices about where we focus, delivering what we say we will, and being honest about our successes and failures. Stability doesn’t mean shrinking our ambition. It just means that we have to focus on the things you want to see from us, and making sure our vision matches our reality.
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“How we bring this new Bungie to life has to be through the spirit of putting players at the forefront of what we do. We have to find a way back to making games that we want to play, but with you at the center.”
What does that mean in concrete terms? Well, they want to “build a stronger long-term future for Destiny, while honoring and restoring its past,” “evolve Marathon to grow our community and build a sustainable future,” “increase transparency around development priorities,” and “communicate more consistently, especially when plans change.”
For Destiny 2, Bungie is undoing its controversial content vaulting. Plans for Marathon are less specific, but the team is acknowledging the game’s failure to gain a strong playerbase while they tease a plan to expand it to “a deeper survival experience.” More details on Marathon’s future are coming “later this week,” while information on Destiny 2 is set for “the months ahead.”
Judging by the early responses from the communities of both games, the message is resonating with the fan base – though some are certainly cynical about “another blog post from Bungo on listening and trust.” Still, concrete plans to undo Destiny 2’s controversial content vaulting go a long way. The question now is simply how the studio’s going to do that with so many developers recently laid off.
Torkan and Deane also say the studio has made “several” changes to its internal operations, “by simplifying our priorities, reducing competing initiatives, moving decisions closer to the teams building our games, and changing how we measure success to place greater emphasis on player satisfaction.”
The pair acknowledge that “none of those changes earn trust on their own,” but they hope that players will “keep holding us accountable” in the future.
“Please keep fighting for what you believe in. Please keep us accountable. And we’ll definitely chat more soon,” Dean reiterates in the video.