Why is Bungie leaning so heavily on 3rd parties? (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, June 17, 2015, 19:14 (3686 days ago)

The recent thread about the Destiny Companion App made me wonder: Why is it that Destiny is so reliant on 3rd party apps, websites, and features? It's the first console game I can think of that practically requires a player to use a 3rd party site or app in order to get full use from the game. I'm talking about these features:

Forming a group or raid for high end content
Accessing World event trackers and timers
Quickly swapping gear between your characters
Examining possible perks for gear, as well as comparing items when you don't actually own or have immediate access to one or both of the items that you want to compare.
PvP performance over time and world rankings
Actual weapon stats, TTK comparisons, etc..
Loot drop locations, chances, etc..
World lore and backstory. Actually, all "story," back or otherwise.
Predictions of vendor items which will show up later that week.
Vendor locations
Vendor inventories
Actual locations of bounty targets
Maps
etc etc etc

I think a huge amount of my frustration with the game is how much of "the game" isn't actually included in the game at all, and requires me to navigate many disparate interfaces, outside of the actual game. I have an entire bookmark folder dedicated purely to websites which provide features that I'd prefer were just a part of the game. The app that Bungie has provided is not as effective or efficient as 3rd party apps for the primary thing I use it for: Moving gear.

So why is this the case? Why didn't Bungie put these features in the game? Why are they actively supporting 3rd party solutions instead of providing their own solutions (which would presumably be safer, more reliable and more trustworthy)? Why have they provided systems which greatly encourage and reward min-maxing but provided no tools whatsoever for achieving maximums or even the necessary tools for knowing what the maxes are?

In a computer MMO, these wouldn't be an issue because you could use a UI that integrated all of these features, but a console based game is a self contained entity and, as such, I think Bungie really needs to put a crapload more customization options in, as well as lots and lots and lots more data as well as more powerful means of interacting with it than physically moving your guardian to each location (especially when those locations are sometimes two loading screens apart, as when you want to go from the reef to the tower).