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8/10/2023 5:53:50 AM
17
Over-delivery isn't over-delivery if you love and play your own game
I was making dinner for my family today when i realized how much it sucks cooking in a hot kitchen in hot temperatures. My brain spent half the time thinking about how much easier it would have been to just order out, and buying those meal prep kits all over the internet right now. The remaining half of my brain thinks completely differently though. Its the part that drives me to do this hard uncomfortable work that I definitely don't have to do because it brings joy to people I care for and even myself once I get to sit down and enjoy the meal. Can't beat a good home-cooked meal right? Maybe whoever is reading this already know where I'm going with this.
Bungie, you changed your philosophy from "We make games we want to play" or something like that. Now your primary philosophy and concern is over-delivery, which just doesn't make any sense... unless you just stopped caring about whether its something you or others enjoy. Why cut cost on something you can make amazing for yourselves? Has money taken such a definitive priority that everything is worth neglecting until the money starts to slow down? Or have the majority of employees just lost interest in the game as players? I get you're a business and money will always be a high priority, no one is arguing that, but if you're going to abandon the original philosophy completely, you owe it to the player base to be honest and transparent about it.
If you want Destiny as a franchise to be nothing but a soulless money-grab, Then instead of wasting our time with a State of the Game wall of text making excuses, why not at least have the backbone to face the people you've seemingly betrayed? Wouldn't you, as players to some extent yourselves, want the same thing? Are you sure you want Destiny to go from your ultimate legacy to your biggest failure? Is money so important that you can no longer be bothered to spend a little extra to make something wonderful for yourselves? What part of the player base are you guys thinking of when you make these decisions? the die-hard fans or the hate-filled fools harassing your employees?
If it means anything to any of you, I am still foolish enough to have hope. I want to believe there are people there that want to still go above and beyond and not turn this this franchise into BAU. To treat themselves to a work of art that speaks for itself in that fun comes first and only secondly does it also happen to benefit the players. I leave this post as a means of love, not hate. Please don't let me down.
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1 ReplyEdited by Hawpy: 8/11/2023 2:03:38 AMIt's not what people want to read but, despite all the memes and jokes about it, there is logic behind the over-delivery point. To go with the cooking analogy, they aren't cooking for people they care about in the same way that you care for your family. For Bungie, it's more akin to a running a restaurant, where there is generally no attachment to an individual diner. Say the chefs go above and beyond to make every dish the best it can be, even at the cost of their own time and money. It's easier to justify early on and when there are fewer people coming, but the longer it goes on and the more people who experience it, the more likely it is that it will become the expectation. When that happens, it's no longer sustainable for the chefs to put out the same quality of food at the same rate and at the same cost. If they raise fees, the customer gets unhappy and threatens to go elsewhere. If they take longer to make the food, the customer complains about slow service. If quality goes down to compensate, even a great meal would be regarded as "good but worse than what I had last time" or "I was expecting better", which still creates a negative sentiment. Then, on top of all that, you have the occasional customer that complains despite being given exactly what they ordered and demanding a refund or other recompense. You run into a Catch-22 where you can't make something that you love without cutting a corner somewhere in order to make it possible. If you cut the corner, it's no longer what you love because it isn't the best it can be. If you don't, then you lack the resources to make it that good. I'm not saying that this maps 1:1 with how Bungie have handled D2 as of late, nor do I think they've done it perfectly, but I'm pretty sick of seeing people use the same low-effort jokes about it and not apply even the slightest amount of thought to what has been said. Ultimately, Bungie is still a business that has to make business decisions. At this scale, labours of love that eat into the finances aren't attractive to the people who make those decisions, and I can assure you that it isn't the devs.
