CoD, Activision, and Destiny (Gaming)

by Malagate , Sea of Tranquility, Sunday, December 01, 2013, 17:40 (3792 days ago) @ Schooly D

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/11/30/activision-may-soon-lose-the-call-of-duty-cash-cow.aspx

Couple of things:

1. If Destiny has a stellar launch and CoD: Ghosts continues to underperform (current figures are not looking good), could we see a switch such that Destiny gets the coveted Fall release slot and CoD shifts to Spring?

Highly doubtful.

2. The article gets something wrong: CoD titles are released every year, but they have two years of development since there are two developers, Treyarch and IW, that alternate games.

but since that's the case...

3. What is the danger for Bungie here, given that Bungie will ostensibly be on the same two-year cycle (which the article claims caused stagnation with CoD) but will, additionally, be developing DLC expansions in the off years? If the development of the expansion doesn't interfere with the development of the next game, will it be a substantial release? If the expansion is substantial enough to affect the next game's release, how concerning is that given it's eating into an already brief, CoD-ish 2-year cycle?

Remember, Destiny has been in development for quite some time now. My money says Destiny 2 will only be on the nextgen platforms, possibly with some kind of Mass Effecty character import feature, so the unique story of your Guardian will continue on through future installments.

I remember when news of the Bungie-Activision contract got out, the opinion of a lot of people in the b.org community was that Bungie made out like bandits, or that it was at least a win-win: Bungie gets ACTV's money and platform while retaining "full creative control" or whatever the phrase was. What if that calculus was wrong? What if the long game is a decisive win for ACTV and loss for BNG, as BNG is forced to pump out Destiny titles on an even more abbreviated schedule than CoD which has now been driven into the ground?

I have faith that Bingle hasn't bitten off more than they can chew. Given the care that goes into the level of polish they're known for, I find it hard to believe they would squeeze themselves into a schedule too tight to maintain. There is too much that could go wrong.

Related Q1: how important is "full creative control" when you're forced to output feature games on what amounts to a 1.5-year dev cycle? How easy is it to break new ground each time?

Related Q2: does releasing Destiny onto not just different platforms, but different generations, sound like something Bungie would want to do? Or does it sound like something ordered at the behest of a publisher? As above, how does this constraint affect "full creative control?"

Creative control, I think, reads as "retains all control of canon and content". As in, if there were some kind of feature, microtransactions, for example, that Activision wanted to see implemented, they might be bound to produce in that respect. But again, they'd have all the decisionmaking power in how that manifests ingame.

If we take a look at Skyrim and Borderlands 2, (arguably larger among the gameplay influences as far as we can currently tell) with respect to DLC, I think there's plenty that can be done within an established gameplay formula to keep things fresh and to push the form. What-Iffing is counterproductive speculation, IMO.

~m