Question for the coder types regarding custom games. (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Monday, February 09, 2015, 19:34 (3382 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I suspect Bungie took a look at custom game statistics, saw that the number of custom games was dwarfed by matchmaking games, and allocated their resources accordingly. Custom games require quite a bit of additional UI work (for the full suite of options we would expect from a Bungie game) and a lot of it must rarely get used.

That's not it. About 10% of players have finished the Vault of glass, assuming Bungie's figure of 1.2 million players finishing it, and sales of 16 million. Yet Bungie put a lot of resources into the raid. I imagine Crota hard mode has even fewer finishing it.

So Bungie has no problem with putting in awesome things that most people don't play.

My guess, as someone who generally didn't like custom Halo games, would be that low utilization did play at least some significant part in their not returning in Bungie's next franchise.

There were around 3.9 billion games of Reach played as of 2012. How many custom games do you think were played during that time? Keep in mind that 10% would put the number of Reach only custom games close to the total number of Firefight games ever played across both ODST and Reach... the latter of which had Firefight matchmaking. (390 million vs 350 million).

Most people don't finish games at all (reports put the range anywhere from 50% to 90% NOT completing campaigns) so putting resources into a mode that a full 10% of your population finished within a few months even though it takes substantially more time and effort than any of your other content... not to mention the grind to get there... That seems pretty good to me!