Sony’s ‘Destiny 2’ Obliteration Has Almost No Precedent In The Industry
Fans are still aghast that Destiny 2 has reached the end of service, with the game not just wrapping up its content updates but also any level of support, with no more balance patches or even hotfixes to come, aside from one or two urgent ones. The Destiny 2 team is sitting around doing nothing, waiting for upcoming layoffs, but the entire thing remains bizarre.
I found myself thinking about whether this has ever happened before in the industry, a long-running live game like this not only being axed, but the IP being totally shelved despite being such a high-profile series, and in this case, a real genre innovator. I have found practically nothing that compares to what Sony and Bungie leadership are doing to Destiny here. A few examples, but ones that don’t quite reach the same level, would be:
Marvel Heroes – The game ran from 2013 to 2017, only four years, and it was killed because Disney cut off its relationship with its developer. But this is Marvel, so obviously that IP was never going to die in the gaming space.
Star Wars Galaxies
LucasArts
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Star Wars Galaxies – Same deal. This time, it ran for 8 years, 2003 to 2011, but was almost immediately replaced by Star Wars: The Old Republic, which continues to make content to this day. And again, this is Star Wars. We will see Star Wars games forever.
Final Fantasy XI
Square Enix
Final Fantasy XI – Before the great saga of Final Fantasy XIV, we had a somewhat similar attempt with the Final Fantasy XI MMO, which required a monthly subscription as was common in those days, and it ran from 2002 to 2015. And again, it was replaced by the still-healthy Final Fantasy XIV.
The only two games I can think of as new IPs that come close to a somewhat similar situation are City of Heroes and Club Penguin, which ran 8 and 12 years, respectively, although City of Heroes lived on through private servers.
There are, of course, many other failed Destiny-likes, Anthem, Marvel’s Avengers and such, but those lifespans were no more than a couple of years at best. They were never hits in the first place.
I suppose you could consider Destiny 2 not “over” just because updates are done, given that the servers are still live, and will be indefinitely, but…it’s over. There is only so much to play when there are no more updates coming for a live-service game, counter to its very nature.
And the other part of this is that Destiny was not part of some mega-IP like Marvel, Star Wars or Final Fantasy, which could immediately make multiple other games using those worlds. Destiny as a whole appears to be dead for the foreseeable future, with no Destiny 3 greenlit, or close to it, and no other IP projects in the works, as Bungie has been thrown into turmoil. The only thing remotely related to this is the mobile game, Destiny Rising, made by NetEase and has effectively no involvement from Bungie or Sony, and may not be long for this world.
There are so many other similar games that have simply continued to exist indefinitely, despite their ups and downs. WoW, obviously, but The Division 2, Warframe, Fallout 76, The Elder Scrolls Online, Borderlands, Guild Wars, Black Desert Online, EVE Online, the list goes on and on and on.
The claim here is always about the unsustainable cost of Destiny, but nearly all MMOs have a high cost to some extent, and these games have been able to figure it out, even with declining, smaller playerbases. The fact that Destiny has been erased as an entire series is truly bizarre, no matter what justifications are given.
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