Monday afternoon, I was minding my business, just being a gamer driving my car, Eugene, in Pacific Drive, having a good old time finishing up that game over there. Suddenly, I get hit with this article. Boy, does it sound bleak.
Initial Reactions to Game Launch
As you read further and further in the article, you’re getting hit with every bit of bad news you could have ever imagined. Pre-orders are down, the day one Steam player count was the lowest it has ever been with the launch of Season of the Wish, a rehash of players’ sentiment in layoffs. The road is ending as you know it because the final shape sucks.
Clarifications and Further Insights
Then, Zan himself came out and posted this quote, “Some things I’d like to clarify: the purpose of this analysis is to estimate how low the pre-order numbers are for The Final Shape, especially after the reported revenue decline in 2023.” Now, emblem.report only tracks active players, 3 to 4 million, so the “quote redeemed” number on emblem redemptions may decrease if a player is no longer active. Well, this is making me scratch my head, wondering what the hell does “no longer active” even mean?
Technical Challenges and Limitations
He goes on to say that Charlot M tracks all 66 million unique Destiny profiles, excluding private profiles. As mentioned in the article, which by the way, he mentions is less than 1%. “How do I know it’s less than 1%? I don’t. I’m literally just regurgitating what we read in the article. But here we are.” Then, the numbers cited in the article are directly provided by the team at Charlamagne, who did a guardian scan on February 23rd on all public Guardian profiles regarding the relative data for the emblems.
Purpose and Expectations
I was planning to investigate this for the first 3 months of each expansion when they are announced. However, the team informed me that the Bunge API does not provide reliable timestamps on the outward-facing parts of the API. For example, Bungie doesn’t provide a timestamp of when someone joins a clan, just that if they’re in a clan or not.” Lastly, “I was genuinely curious about The Final Shape’s performance, which is why I wanted to do this piece. As mentioned in the article, the figures presented are not exact representations of the official pre-orders. They are intended to provide an estimate of the total pre-orders for the expansions.
Analysis of Pre-Order Numbers
I don’t know what kind of backpedaling, narrative-fitting, doomsday posting shenanigans this is, but what I get out of this is we don’t really know. We kind of know, but we don’t really know what we don’t know. This has made me question literally everything, like what is “active”? Why is BrayTech only tracking 970,000 Guardians?
How do refunds affect this metric? Keep in mind, consoles actually auto-refunded The Final Shape for folks after The Final Shape was delayed. Does this have an effect? And let me just say, everybody has got a different answer on this. TLDR, fellas, we don’t know what the hell the pre-order numbers actually are.
Even if I was to take BrayTech numbers right here, which does show pre-order values 100 days out for all of the major expansions—Beyond Light, Witch Queen, and Lightfall—being relatively the same as it is here for The Final Shade, even if I was to base things off of those numbers, I still can’t stand by those numbers in complete faith because there are holes here as well.
Real Metrics of Success
And keep in mind, even though the pre-order numbers here are very skewy, I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know who to believe. There is one metric, though, that does not lie, and that is the day one peak seasonal player counts on Steam. This is the chart that concerns me more than anything. The hell with the pre-order numbers.
Season of the Witch and Season of the Wish both are very concerning. Now, why aren’t we pointing out those two seasons? Well, number one, Season of the Wish, it hurts to see the numbers that low, considering, in my eyes—and maybe it’s just me out here—I find Season of the Wish to be one of the best seasons Bungie has ever done.
Embracing the Challenge: A Deep Dive into Destiny’s Solid Season
And I know, before people jump up and say, “You’re just saying that because you love Warlords Ruin.” Yes, and I know Warlord’s Ruin is sold separately, but I still lump it into the season. But between the Coil, Warlord’s Ruin, LFGb, and Bronto is in-game, that being fireteam finder, to me, this has been a solid season. A long one, but a solid one.
Hell, in December and in January, I was playing Destiny every single day. We were doing build battles back to back, and between the artifact mods and the sandbox reworks that came at the beginning of the season.
Reflections on Player Engagement
I was having more fun playing Destiny than I have pretty much all year, but then I look at the numbers and I realized, damn, I guess it was just me and a handful of other Guardians. Now, even more concerning than that, though, is Season of the Witch. Why is this a concerning number? Hell, when you compare it to Seraph, it’s slightly better; it’s even better than Season of the Worthy. Season of the Witch went hand in hand with the announcement of The Final Shape, similar to Season of the Plunder.
Analysis of Season Performance
But why were Plunder’s numbers so good? A couple of contributing factors: number one, King’s Fall—a lot of people were hyped for that raid; number two, and arguably the biggest contributor to Plunder doing so well, was the reveal of Lightfall. I’m constantly just observing my own chat. We don’t necessarily have the entire Destiny community in our streams when we’re observing the reveal of the annual expansion, but we have somewhere around 20 to maybe 30,000 people who are engaged when we are discussing the reveal for those expansions.
And let me just tell you, from my experience, just from our own discussions, it was a night and day difference in hype levels between the reveal of Lightfall and the reveal of The Final Shape. And I think that has had some contributing factors to the day one numbers for Season of the Witch being as low as it is, and at the same time, Season of the Plunder being as high as it is.
Comparative Analysis of Seasons
Objectively speaking, Season of the Witch was better than Season of the Plunder on all fronts. Yeah, I know you love King’s Fall, but let me just be real: day one raid experience, Cro in was better; the story was also great in Season of the Witch. I was down with the Embark engine, the deck building that we had, the seasonal activities. Objectively speaking, Season of the Witch was better than Plunder. The only thing Plunder had was a hell of a lot of hype behind it, simply because Lightfall and its reveal was absolutely banging.
Concerns for Future Seasons
If there was one metric that I can look at and say yes, that is cause for concern, it would be both Season of the Witch and Season of The Wish having a massive decline, which means that trip all the way to the top, to the peak that Season of Defiance—that being the launch of Lightfall—had already set, that is going to be a hell of a hike. Now, I know some of you are like, “Cross, why does this matter?”
Impact of Performance Metrics
It has to beat Lightfall’s numbers, but why does that even matter? Well, I guess to you and I, it may not matter that much, but to people working at Bungie, it matters a lot. Because the moment Bungie or Sony starts to believe that hey, things are going to be pulling back quite a bit for Destiny 2, that means more layoffs are on the horizon.
And as we’ve seen here from PlayStation this past week and also from Bungie last year, we know they are willing to cut people. The sticky position, though, that Bungie is in now, which is very different than their contract that was with Activision, is that Activision didn’t own Bungie. Now, it’s been relayed to me by internal sources that Activision wanted to, trust me, fellas, they surely wish they did.
The difference here is that Sony does, in fact, own Bungie. The more Bungie messes up, the more control Sony gains over Bungie, which is why these next 3 months leading up to The Final Shape are arguably the most important months in Bungie’s history. If that is, Bungie wants to keep operating as Bungie.
Inspiration from Forsaken
We brought it up on stream yesterday, but you want to know the moment where Forsaken went from just being another expansion to holy [is this really happening right now]? The moment for me was when I sat there and I watched Bungie developers equip a shotgun in the energy slot, and then they proceeded to say, hey, not only can you use a shotgun in the energy slot, you can use it in the kinetic slot. Oh, but wait, you can equip both shotguns at the same time. Matter of fact, if you got Legend of Acrius or Tractor Cannon, you can hold three shotguns at once. The reason why this was so mind-blowing was that I could not fathom Bungie giving us this level of freedom in our loadouts.
Game-Changing Features of Forsaken
You see, we just came off of Destiny 2 Vanilla, where everything was extremely restricted. We had static rolls, you had two primaries that you could use, and a special or heavy weapon that you used in the heavy slots, and that was it. Then, Bungie, inside of Forsaken, swung completely the other way in their showcase, which revolutionized how the game would be played inside of Destiny. And with the inclusion of random rolls, also the new subclasses, the hype train for Forsaken, without even including the narrative of Cayde, was literally jumping off the rails. It was insane, and if you had asked me in Curse of Osiris what Bungie could do to shake things back up.
Innovations for The Final Shape
I would have just been like, “Yeah, just give us back random rolls and a special weapon.” But I never fathomed the idea of putting special weapons in what used to be, back at D1, the primary slot only—that being the kinetic slot—and the energy slot, that being our special weapon slot. That is what we were used to for years. But that is the shake-up that Bungie’s going to need to do for The Final Shape. Can they do it? Time is definitely not in their favor. Three months is not a lot of time, but here are a few things that would really wow us, and again, this is my cop list.
Desired Game Changes
Number one, a new subclass. I know, Cross, we’re never going to get it; you’re setting yourself up for failure, quit it. Look, all I’m saying is, if they roll out with that red subclass, that would get people pretty damn hyped. Number two, a new level of rarity. You remember back in Black Armory, dude? Everybody was going crazy because we were speculating that Black Armory literally meant a new rarity beyond exotic. Look, there’s a variety of different ways you can go with this.
Introducing a New Rarity
You can literally give us Uber Exotics and make them super super rare, which I know would drive everybody up the wall. But let me ask you, are current Exotics really that rare to you? No, no, they’re very easy to get and extremely frequent. My postmaster and my inventory are full of exotic engrams. That freak-out moment when an exotic engram would drop on the ground for you is not present anymore in Destiny. But if you added a new level of rarity to something, and you made it Best in Class, best in slot, and super super rare, people would lose their mind.
Merging Subclasses
Now, another thing that I would love to see happen, and again, it’s still part of my cop list, but upon defeating The Witness, guys, it would be amazing if somehow, someway, we obtained the power to merge subclasses. Now, there could be some restrictions, but the way I look at it is, what if we had the ability to merge light and darkness subclasses? Imagine combining Stasis with Solar, Strand with Arc. I literally brought up this example, but can you imagine dropping a Raisin Shuan into a group of enemies, it’s spinning around all over the place, and at the same time.
PvP Balance vs. Wow Factor
At this point, and I say this as a PvP player who loves that Bungie is making all these updates and changes to PvP, and believe me, I’m going to be playing it, but right now, you need a wow factor. If you dial back the wow for the sake of balance in PvP, Bungie, you’re going to lose him. Was One-Eyed Mask as broken when it first came to us in Forsaken? You damn right it was. Shards of Galanor was also broken. Ursa Furiosa was busted, but everybody was losing their mind for those Exotics because the wow factor was over a thousand. Merging Subclasses together? I know, sounds wild. How do you even go about balancing such a thing? And my answer to that is, forget the balance.
Game Direction and Innovation
If there was one thing that I really loved when I heard that Tyson Green was now Destiny 2’s game director, it was this quote from Joseph Staten: “Of all the people on the team, Tyson Green and I are probably the people who are most frightening for Jason Jones and the programmers. We’re the most crazy, scripting, crack-smoking ‘this be so cool, damn the framerate, let’s pound the code and make these crazy things happen.'” Guys, am I setting myself up for failure with this copium list?
The Future of Destiny 2
Look, I think if you don’t hit something that truly wows us, The Final Shape will fail. And not in the way that we think it will fail. It will fail for Bungie themselves. I’ve seen teams either get wiped out completely and companies downsize immensely when games that have experienced hyper-growth then start to experience contraction and ultimately collapse, which would be a major shame for Destiny 2 and its community.
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