If I had to guess from their relationship with Blizzard I'm guessing they are going to run Destiny 2's online services in China.

https://twitter.com/saraheneedleman/status/1002657387185139718:

Now, our long-term goal is to become an entertainment company that sustains many worlds simultaneously

They can barely support Destiny, even as big as they are. Supporting something else alongside Destiny seems basically impossible at this point.

I’m equal parts very worried and excited for whatever’s next. Will we see Bungie move to a Ubisoft model where “developed by Bungie” isn’t actually a very specific descriptor?

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I've been saying for a while now that I'm so ready for Bungie to move on from Destiny. If this helps with that, great. I love Bungie. Bungie's not perfect and sometimes drives me absolutely insane with what they do (or don't do). I love Marathon, I love Oni, I love (their) Halo. I love Destiny's gameplay, but there's nothing else really there beyond Crucible and Raiding (to me). They're allowed to take risks and mess up every now and then. I hope they move away from shady-Bungie and go in a different, better direction with whatever comes next. I'm excited, and I have no problem patiently waiting for their next big thing.

I mean, right? This feels like they're priming us for an eventual announcement that they will be ending their involvement with Destiny and moving on to new things. There's very few other ways to read this, IMO. They can barely support Destiny as it is right now. What will the future of this series look like with their attention split between different projects?

It's a bittersweet moment for me. On the one hand, Bungie is a talented studio filled with creative ideas, and I have always felt that their decision to limit themselves to working on one franchise at a time prevents them from exploring some of those ideas. I want to see a version of Bungie that just makes cool shit and doesn't worry so much about building massive multi-million dollar franchises out of it. I also feel that, as much as I have enjoyed my time with Destiny, I have to acknowledge that Bungie seems to have major difficulties with keeping the game fresh and supported with regular content updates. The addition of partner studios like High Moon Studios and Vicarious Visions has helped to a degree, but it still feels like the game just isn't getting content drops with the frequency that its design demands.

On the other hand, I will be sad to see Bungie abandon this series with so much of its potential left untapped. Now, make no mistake: This is definitely not the last we will see of this franchise. Bungie still has a contract with Activision that must be honored, which means one of two things will happen. Either Bungie will fulfill the terms of the contract and deliver two more games (unlikely, in my opinion, although a Bungie-developed D3 is possible), or Bungie will sell the IP to Activision and future games in the series will be developed by studios like High Moon Studios and Vicarious Visions. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Vicarious Visions, at the very least, has shown with Warmind that they have the ability to create a fun experience within the world created by Bungie, but I do not know if they have the ability to scale that up to a full game, or whether they can maintain the creative direction that Bungie has taken with the series.

Time will tell. I do feel strongly that this signals the beginning of the end. I get the same vibe from this announcement that I got when Bungie announced their split with Microsoft in 2007.

EDIT: I missed an opportunity to title this post "This is it, baby. Hold me." Damn it!

In case, for some reason, we want to look back at what a collective of Destiny players on Reddit thought of this announcement.

"Our Newest Partnership"

"Bungie CEO says the new partnership with NetEase is so they can publish their own games and not rely on Activision"

This makes Noseworthy's tweet about showing how committed they are to Destiny at E3 make more sense.

Twitter is a weird form of information disbursement, where because I try to keep my follow list trim enough to be a completionist, I often just see people's reactions to things without the actual news or context. It's like living in a world of echos and reflected light.

I think people are probably getting ahead of themselves, for multiple reasons, so I'll "respond" to each point I generally see people making:

This means Bungie is abandoning Destiny...

No, not really. We have to remember they've always said Destiny had a roughly 10 year plan around it. Depending on where you're counting from, we're either halfway through that plan or significantly through it, but either way, a lot of time has passed. This is about the time they'd start spinning up other projects. Remember, we had to wait FOUR years between Reach and Destiny for a new Bungie game.. they practically sat out the span of a regular console generation. Keep in mind how much they've supported their previous games when contractually able to - I'm not concerned.

They can barely keep up with content for Destiny! They're gonna add another game?!?!

Okay, I'll stay away from the opinion part but.. this is what all developers do. You spin up the next project while the current one is underway. This is how you keep people employed and things rolling. If Bungie waited until the last Destiny 3/4/5 content to even start working on another project, they'd have to lay off 90% of their workforce. You guys want games to have 3 year dev cycles? Alright, Bungie is going to need to start 4 years before (due to previs, pitch, etc) the game's release to get it out in time so there's no gap.

Know what's 4 years from now?

2022.

Know what year Destiny will be in then?

Year 8 if you count from D1's release. Year 12 if you're counting from Reach. Split the difference.. Destiny will be at 10 years of active development. Just like the plan. lol.

But the contract..

The best part of a new Bungie IP is we won't have people going "BUT THE CONTRACT" for the next one for another 10 years. I really, REALLY hate that the contract was made public, because people just use it to short circuit discussion about the game constantly, and don't understand contracts change, get changed, or even misinterpreted what was in the contract itself. It's been one of the worst things for casual community discussion.

Why talk about it now?

Like I said above - if they want to transition people to new projects and work, the spin up has to start now. They have to be able to publically talk about it existing, so they can hire for it more easily. I would not expect to hear anything substantial about this project until 2020 at minimum, because I'm assuming they're in pitch phase if they're showing potential partners like NetEase and are signing things just now - they wouldn't have had the spare manpower or money to start truly spinning anything substantial up - so I'll just call it the Bungie 202X Project.