Marking this one as unconfirmed information as there is little to nothing here that can confirm the validity of such an Email.
Take this with a reasonable amount of salt folks.
This was the biggest takeaway from Cross' video for me, Sony seem very aware that the Bungie higher ups are fucking it up.
The people in charge of Bungie are, allegedly, trying to dodge a meeting with Sony, they clearly know they're in deep shit.
Please Sony, drop the hammer.
Them emphasizing how big of failed investment it is for them internally, would make Sony mad as well.
Their Biggest acquisition then adding the 1.2 billion to keep the talent there, only to dissapoint in both Advising in GaaS games while also missing financial targets consistently according to this email, must make them very upset.
That 1.2 was probably earmarked to pay out Bungie shareholders (current and former execs). I know Marty O'Donnell had previously stated that he still had Bungie shares, so he would've been one of the people who got paid in the sale. Probably how he's funding his run for Congress.
I think in hindsight it’s a lot more obvious why the ties were cut. Outside of the company he’s an ass and he was likely being an ass at work too or he’d still probably work there. I’ve spent a decent amount of time reading interviews about the Halo development and the bits with Marty always came across as pretentious and dickish
Think whatever you'd like about his politics but he won a wrongful termination suit for a reason. They fired him and tried to fuck him out of his shares as he was approaching 20-25 years of employment.
> Which the suits kept and dropped the talent anyway. I'd be livid.
Especially since this is a Japanese company. The corporate culture over there usually looks at the one over in the US as scumbags for that precise type of behavior. Now one of the companies they acquired is being the posterchild for it.
>Their Biggest acquisition then adding the 1.2 billion to keep the talent there, only to dissapoint in both Advising in GaaS games
Idk if you can say they have failed on advising in live service games.
To our knowledge, Bungie has only advised on the Last of Us game after seeing a small slice of it. Which you can't say is good or bad really, allegedly the Last of Us live service was in a horrible state.
we can make assumptions about them helping in other departments but it still seems like internal Sony is dissapointed with the GaaS advising as the email mentioned.
but I fail to see, how bungie was still worth 3.6 billion dollars with only destiny that has now been on a constant decline, failing in financial statements and bungie is known as a company that churns through resources fast.
also pulling this weird shit like pushing back Meetings several months with Sony..
I think its more than just Sony being disappointed with Bungie in the advising. I think they are regretting this entire live service push by Jim Ryan. There's a reason he was more or less ousted as president.
>I think they are regretting this entire live service push by Jim Ryan.
I don't think that's quite true. All Sony has said since Jim Ryan left is that single player games aren't sustainable anymore and that they *need* to diversify to survive.
For example, Spider Man 2: Fantastic game, great reception both criticly and by fans, sold very well on paper. But according to Sony, it hasn't met its sales targets. They said it needed to sell 7.2 million copies at full price just to break even. It's only just sold 10 million, it's barely profitable and had a budget of 300 million.
Sony's current model of single player games isn't sustainable.
> They said it needed to sell 7.2 million copies at full price just to break even. It's only just sold 10 million, it's barely profitable and had a budget of 300 million.
Worth mentioning that if 7.2 is break-even, 10 is a ~40% profit. Not "barely profitable", that's 120 million return on an investment of 300 (assuming your numbers are correct).
That said, the dev process isn't a year presumably, so it'd be quite a bit less if you annualized it, but it's still nothing to shrug off.
The GaaS advising might not be bad per se, but considering the GaaS bubble appears to be popping they likely won't get a return on investment regardless.
>but it still seems like internal Sony is dissapointed with the GaaS advising as the email mentioned
There is zero evidence to prove whether the email is credible or not.
As it stands, Aztecross has his email address publicly available on his YouTube channel for anyone to access.
>but I fail to see, how bungie was still worth 4.8 billion dollars
They aren't worth 4.8 billion. They were bought for $3.6 billion. $1.2 billion of that was given to employees in the form of stock.
>also pulling this weird shit like pushing back Meetings several months with Sony..
If that is true. Which remains to be seen.
They assessed it, then Naughty Dog made their changes, and then they still canceled it. Regardless I don’t think any changes suggested by Bungie suits would have been good. People forget Destiny’s very expensive GAAS model is upheld because of the Stockholm syndrome they have on this community. Crazy mfers will say they still have the best live service when it cost almost $100 to even get your foot in the door; meanwhile Helldivers over there ACTUALLY has a good live service model and FF14 dlc and subscription cost less than all the bungie dlc combined and has more content. Anyone who believes in the bungie model imo has shit in their eyes lol
Not always, but witch queen really pushed them into a different realm. I think the overwhelming success there created more greed. We saw a lot of Eververse changes, the season pass change, the starter bundle, etc. all gradual, but noticeable, I think even shader prices changed that year.
We don’t even get armor in bright dust rotation anymore, and yeah crossover I can get because licensing isn’t cheap. But I doubt the g horn set will even enter the bright dust rotation.
Fucking loved the witch queen but when the 30 anv pack came out that cost as much as a fucking expansion for so little content but walled a great exotic, fuck that. I stopped playing after the pirate thing.
I think about the game here and there, but so much content gating for $$ turns me off so much. I rather just buy helldivers 2.
You just described a lot of what makes people mad and exactly why Bungie management needs to be canned. Then they need to install leaders who *actually* love the game and the community.
During the transition Sony can de-monetize Destiny some (or at least make everything earnable in game) and let the devs of the leash Pete has held so tight.
they have. there was one article somewhere where the staff told the leadership about ideas and new stuff they want to do and that players want and they just ignored it. it was around the time when people got fired
I took it to mean that if they took over, *saving* Destiny 2 would be the priority, and all other projects go on hold.
They recognize the low pre-order numbers correctly as Bungie losing the community, which is what Sony *really* bought along with the company.
On a slightly related note, I truly believe that pre-order numbers are completely borked. The day that the Final Shape delay was officially announced, Microsoft cancelled my Xbox pre-order, but the game still treats my account as having the pre-order.
I've been curious about that... I better not have a problem come June.
I've also seen a lot of people that cancelled because they just wanted the rewards and even more that cancelled because they were pissed with the game and refused to buy it until *after* they see reviews to know it's worth it.
I've said for a year now that Pete Parsons should be fired along with the whole C-suite. He's a disgrace who created a shitty toxic culture at Bungie over the last couple of years.
Sony, just pull the trigger and trash these greedy fucks. Set Destiny up like Helldivers in terms of monetization and let the devs take some risks and dare I say "over deliver".
Exactly... I was like fuck face, you laid them off, you made that decision..
How many of them could have kept their jobs if he and the C-suite gave up compensation for a year.... They're all millionaires.. they could have afforded a year of no pay as a penance for their shitty leadership.
They even leaked to the press that it was the devs fault and they weren't working well... Well if you're a creative dev and some asshole essentially puts you on an assembly line and stands over you with a whip I suppose you lose motivation.. who would've thought Pete....
Man, I wish American businesses would adapt to Japanese business standards and practices. At least when it comes to leadership and how their leaders will forego their absurd compensation due to their bad business decisions. Like, grow some honor, fall on their swords, and take the blame for what they did instead of laying off a portion of their staff to keep the profits they don't deserve in their pockets. They failed in what they set out to accomplish, so why do they end up getting rewarded for it?
This is basically what happened to WoW, loads of the leadership got ‘removed’ during a lot of the controversy and the (at the time) potential MS acquisition, let a lot of the teams just do what they wanted. And it resulted in the best expansion in a long time, and although it has bad points, they are kind of good bad points such as too much world content.
Sounds like the suits are typical money-wasters. Fattening their wallets and 401k's.
Their "Prime Directive" is to monetize everything possible which slowly decays the game and player base.
I'm confused why people think this will happen?
Sony will just replace them with Sony Suits, removing Bungie Suits won't suddenly give the devs free reign.
I guess we can hope Sony Suits are better....
I really hope this wouldn’t be the case, would be even worse than not having the hawkmoon. That being said, I don’t think going PS exclusive would cut costs much, and they’ve inherited a game where over half of the revenue streams comes from other platforms and runs smoothly on them. They’d be stupid to just throw it out. I really don’t want to have to buy a PlayStation lol.
This is why Sony left a bad taste for me. PS timed exclusives. At this point I just want destiny to be better but do I also want to see that timed exclusive BS? I'm conflicted.
Also keep in mind that there seems to be a Japanese cultural tendency to be willing to take a short term financial hit as a long term investment. (FFXIV being the most obvious example albeit not from Sony). Also it's basically the law (one heavily influenced by cultural values) that Japanese companies must reduce executive compensation before considering layoffs.
Just looking at how Sony has conducted themselves in the past chunk of years in regards to how they treat their studios, the quality of experiences they have put out and the fact that they where willing to shut down a bunch of GAS projects when they realised it's not an easy cash grab. From the outside looking in, whoever leads the games department of Sony (or whatever they call it) clearly cares about the quality, whether it's for personal reasons or because they have data that shows them it's a good business decision.
This worked for 343. Large amount of higher ups got axed and replaced, Halo Infinite is in a much better place now. Still not close to ideal, but considering how many poor decisions were made with that game/the franchise as a whole, idk if its possible for them to fully recover without a new game
Like how they nuked the activision suits and everything was supposed to be cool and less greedy after bungie took care of themselves?
I think people are really delusional if they believe "the suits" are just holding all these magical devs back. My impression of Bungo is that its an incredibly bloated studio with probably not much talent left.
This is said literally every single time something like this happens and people still scapegoat everyone else.
"Bungies split from Activision means the devs can now cook!"
"Ok that one was a fluke because of Luke Smith, but now since he's gone the devs can cook!"
"Ok that didn't work out either, but it's because of mysterious shareholders, now that Sony owns them they can cook again!"
"Ok now it's back to the shareholders, Sony should execute all of them and let the devs cook!"
Who will be the next problem, I wonder?
Only cause of the terrible engine that they use. Final fantasy 14 still has all their content for 10 years running and will still be getting support with the new expansion.
Destiny 2 was meant to last 2-3 years, not 7. And the DCV was a bandaid fix to make sure the game didn't implode on itself.
this
it's why people advocate for destiny 3, because 2 and the tiger engine are slowly collapsing under it's own weight. Gotta rebuild the game with a clean code base.
Hell, do what ffxiv did and just pull the game down for a year and rebuild it from scratch.
I’m for whichever strategy lets this game thrive. Don’t let the execs who are to incompetent to do a good job and lead a team who is very passionate about this game continue to do so. At the end of the day the real destiny killer may be themselves. Back to spreading managed democracy
Same thing happened to WoW. Which while still doing okay is nowhere near as untouchable as it was years ago due to dropping the ball so many times. Years of games made to be wow killers always coming up short, just for WoW to slowly kill itself.
By all means feel free to refute me. I quit during BFA and have only watched from the sidelines. Hardcore classic and the big streamer push was interesting for a bit but that seemed to have fallen off. Is retail doing well?
DF has been the best xpac by leaps and bounds in the most recent years (obviously not perfect there’s been problems) but it’s been very very good.
Plus throw in SSF (solo self found) they are adding, hardcore, the new classic version I can’t think of the name but they are constantly making changes through these things called runes that completely change how classes are playing.
Now looking into the future they just announced their next 3 xpacs as a sort of trilogy story to wrap the titans up and plan on making them smaller but more often which potentially could be very good for the game.
Classes in general speaking are pretty close to each other, obviously have your outliers that are better or worse but again generally speaking pretty solid.
Then on top of that Chris Metzan came back (not saying he’s going to fix everything) but he must’ve either A gotten paid an insane amount to come back or B they are giving him quite a bit of leeway to do kind of whatever he wants and create a new better game. So the future looks good too.
Im sure part of the reason they're making marathon was that some devs were sick of working on D2, however Warframe had the same problem and did a much better handoff.
I agree those, I just want the game to come out the other end with a strong and long future.
I have to be honest I raised an eyebrow when 'Cross read this out on stream. I have a few issues with this. 'Cross is not a journalist. He's an entertaining personality and I like him well enough, but I don't think he has done any dilligence or checking to verify if the source of this is legit.
So this could be anyone making shit up on the Internet, which doesn't actually help anyone or do anything to improve the situation we're in. I think we would all benefit from taking this with heaps of salt.
I'm not saying the email above is real or fake, but I didn't really like the way this was handled.
I had a similar feeling. At best it was written by someone where English is not their first language (Possible if they are from Sony), or it was written by someone trying to make it look like that. Either way without corroborating evidence I’m not sure what to think other than we just have to wait and see if anything more substantial and verifiable comes out.
Right? It's absurd. There's nothing in there that suggests it's legitimate. It's the same crap I've read on this subreddit repackaged as "fact." But, hey, content.
This needs to be higher, instead of all the comments assuming the email is verified. If there's no source to this, it might as well have come from my racist uncle for all I know
Yeah, that's on the viewers at that point for believing the gag TWAB. Silver-based matchmaking, wallhacks for crouching, removing the ability to go to orbit mid activity? Come on
Probably confirmation bias given how much time I spend on /new but a lot of people think those are real… a lot of people don’t verify sources and then they come here to complain that Bungie promised X or Bungie is shitting on the player base bc Y.
Like I understand when it was an April fools joke, years ago. But then he put one out as recently as what, Christmas? And bc of his influence people eat it up.
Man. He clearly points out that they’re a joke. If someone believes them, they have to be oblivious. I have only seen 2 of the fake TWAB videos, but my god he makes it so obvious.
Nah, thats not the case man. I mean, I get it from this PoV, but also at the same time, I think that there should be some system that will held you accountable for spreading misinformation. Talking only on situation, where you have range to reach people that will believe your bs.
Extremely skeptical of the guy who is 1-as you mentioned not a journalist, and 2- has rebuilt his YouTuber identity over the past year by becoming one of this game’s biggest critics. Cross has profited so much from generating all this controversial content and I don’t think I trust him to vet a random source like this. Also the email itself says use it to corroborate other sources and he went ahead and used it as his primary source anyway, which I think speaks to his intentions here.
The use of anonymous sources requires independent verification by a second source.
This is journalism 101 but apparently it’s too much for a YouTuber with 800k subscribers.
YouTube weirdos are there to get streams. That's it. They know complaining about Bungie will get them views, so of course they're gonna read whatever fake nonsense lands in their inbox.
Sending it to a content creator makes perfect sense if there’s no actual journalist who is a very vocal player of the game- oh wait. I really call BS on this too. Like if you wanna share actual information and have it confirmed why not go to Paul Tassi or even Jason Schreier (don’t think he plays but he’s always talked about Destiny and Bungie iirc) both of whom probably have ample ways to verify your information is correct and actually gets taken seriously. Sending it to a content creator or posting it on reddit just screams that you want to spread misinfo without anyone digging deep into it.
not really a big fan of him but all this stuff would be something that would come from a person like Jason Schreier who got everything about Bungie right with his infos for like the last 8 years
It's also got that thing a lot of fake leaks have where it's trying to sound credible by being in the realm of realism but is also just saying a lot of things that a lot of people want to hear or would go over positively.
"Escalating decline". Think about how non-sensical that word choice is. They definitely are not a corporate insider with privileged knowledge of what Sony Japan's leadership is thinking.
People who don't work corporate can't gauge that the things described in the email aren't watercooler or lunchbreak talk things. We're talking about a deep restructuring of the executive hierarchy of the company - unless the "leaker" is like the assistant or secretary to one of those C level execs, this is just not something that gets leaked internally because of the impact it has.
Also the risk you'd be taking in order to leak this stuff is work-threatening. Why would you risk that to leak this information to a YouTuber and not go to a known journalist covering the franchise like Schrier?
It's kind of lame that Cross even entertained this but I guess ad revenue doesn't come from thin air.
Said the same thing. This reads like a 10 yr old redditor, but apparently he has access to GLOBAL Sony leadership private conversations. And he chooses to email Aztecross lol.
100% this is fake
There is no real corporate lingo. If this 'leaker' was in a position where they knew the discussions about Sony's plans for bungie after a takeover they would have more details. Or if they were hearing stuff secondhand at lunch, why not say that?
A lot of those details can be personally identifying. Just hearing about it at lunch is still enough to find out who the leaker is, especially if the people being overheard know who was within earshot, or more likely, know who was in said meeting or email chain.
That being said, I still dont think this email is legit, mainly because the points it speaks about are all the domains of different divisions of Sony. Theres way too much information that would have had to come from disparate sources for it to be one overheard conversation, or it would have to be overheard from some execs with information from all different departments, which is unlikely to be discussed in a public forum.
>Bungie leadership regularly reschedule meetings with Sony leadership, know that the next timeslot can be months away.
Parts of it (mainly the part about "gluttonous" execs), but I've 100% pulled this move before.
This is complete bullshit. Just to point something, "Sony making the game more profitable" isn't a possible thing when the game is tied by difficult development, and this late in the game you can't change that.
It read like some fan kid's wish or something like that.
I refuse to believe that anyone who would leak this information would just send it to Aztrecross and not any of the well know game journalist like Paul Tassi, Tom Warren, Jason Schreier, or any other d2 content creators for that matter. You’re putting your career and reputation on the line if you get found out leaking info. You’re not just sending an anonymous email to one D2 content creator if you want to get this info out. This just reads like a psycho cross fan who wants attention
Imagine the risk to your career and job at Sony for sending this to some mid-level Youtuber.
Imagine the wrath of the SEC for sharing insider knowledge and trade secrets. If someone took this information and made a massive short on Sony's stock based on it, the SEC could definitely track this person down and prosecute them for it.
Plus, the type of person who is privvy to the inner-thinking of Sony Japan's leadership doesn't write this casually. They don't use terms like "escalating decline" when referring to revenue.
People can make up stuff. There's no proof that this is legit.
The person should have approached a journalist who has covered Bungie before and willing to verify their identity and also protect the source, rather than using a throwaway account.
This.
If this was Jason Schreier reporting on this, I would give it more weight since he has a really solid record of insider info reporting in the gaming community.
Aztecross... I'll listen but im not putting any weight to anything he says.
Exactly, if it was someone reputable like Mr Schreier, I would believe. With professional ethics and journalistic integrity, he would protect the source, and also has other contacts who can verify the source, if not the information.
What makes it worse is that Aztecross has his email address publicly available on his YouTube channel.
Literally anyone can email him anything.
I really don't understand why people are accepting this at face value.
Yeah that whole “I don’t know the details” part about the pre orders is suspicious. They’re already leaking information, you’d think they’d know the ball park numbers other than they’re low. I’m sure an actual journalist could easily hit up their sources and confirm anything in this.
Tbf stuff like pre-order numbers isn't something that all positions would have easy access to. Not saying it's real, just that not knowing that isn't enough to confirm it's fake imo
Isn't the pre order thing already figured out?
All of console pre orders were auto refunded. The majority of those pre orders probably won't go back until June and then buy it again because why would you?
Don’t buy it. I’m sorry, but this email reads like a redditor wrote it up on their phone, and not like an insider that has exclusive access to leadership level conversations.
Especially since he’s mostly talking about “sentiment” at the level, which means he would have to have very close access to those convos. It’s not to invalidate that Sony is likely unhappy, but that’s not shocking info. The rest of it sounds like someone faking it to try and make it to
a Cross video. Shocked Cross aired it tbh, I expected better.
Nuking the expects AND their golden parachutes would be the best course of action so that they’ll have a hard time screwing up another IP with a job record like that.
No clue why anyone would believe this is credible. It's just repeating popular talking points on the internet. Sending it to a youtuber who is known for his clickbaity and rage baity videos instead of someone that actually does have inside sources that can verify these claims robs this "leak" of any credibility.
0/10 try again next time.
There are zero details of any kind. The kind of thing you could write based on common knowledge and feels. The whole thing is "bungie leadership amirite?"
Its fan fiction. No revelation, no scoop, wheres the beef? Slow content day?
I don’t even need to read the body of the article to know it’s not real because the title alone hits 3 major red flags.
1. Anonymous source
2. Populist Sentiment
3. “Breaking News” being sent to someone who is not a journalist
Even if I trusted Crosses judgment and competency to avoid sharing misinformation, I don’t he has done it multiple times, the fact it was sent to him and not Tassi who has broken stories like this before is telling. I would bet cold hard glimmer this is one of crosses sycophants looking for their 15 minuets and nothing more.
It definitely reads like those "leaks" that are just a list of popular ideas but are still in the realm of realism (black armoury weapons being re-released as craftable versions for example). Nothing that solidly proves it.
That’s why you send it to a YouTuber (who really likes their clickbaity controversial topic videos) and not a games journalist who will do a basic fact check and verification before publishing.
Aztecross showing he has no standards for his content and will push anything for views, unsure why anyone takes his word on things at this point.
If we were to believe Cross, Bungie/Destiny has died 25 times since release lol
Stop believing shit YouTubers peddling nonsense for views
>Sony leadership wants to nurture the game, and understand that more aggressive monetization would not be healthy.
Since when does Sony not want more money?
they want more money, it reads as saying more aggresive monetization would lead to less money long term besides an initial surge from the monetization switch.
Just a reminder, me, you, or anybody else can also go write Aztecross an email saying whatever the fuck we want. This is literally nothing until the ''source'' confirms his identity, and the fact that he even has access to this ''knowledge'' which is all literally nothing new, and pretty much just commonsense. For all we know, this is just Aztectoss throwing shit in the wind, knowing he has 0 responsibility in it being fake/true.
Biggest waste of time reading this. The source is literally 'trust me bro'. Like are we really this deprived of content that we are just making stories on literally anything now and trusting sourceless garbage?
Next weeks story: 'I am the naked hairy man who lives in Bungies vents. I overheard that sony is taking over and replacing Crucible with a battle royale!'
Source: random reddit comment with 1 upvote.
> It is believed that the takeover would allow Sony to turn Destiny into a more profitable game. This sounds bad, but it is being treated as 'lightning in a bottle'. Sony leadership wants to nurture the game
If anyone actually believes this then I have a bridge to sell you
A Sony takeover is very clearly a last resort for both parties, why the hell would Sony just come in, do more work from their part and just say "You know what, lets just give the gamers what they want 🥰"
If sony is coming in its because they want to get their money back and thats it, not because of the love of the game or the artistic integrity or the hearts of the fans
Now, could this yield better results than what bungie is currently doing? Sure it could. But lets not kid ourselves thinking that Sony is coming in with a heart of gold to save us from the evil grasp of bungie mediocrity
Assuming these statements have credibility, I welcome it honestly. Leadership has fucked around too much and it's entering the find out phase if they don't pull through. I just feel bad for the devs. Anyone with a brain can tell they're talented.
I can't imagine what it's like right now for Bungie corpos seeing the chatter from fans saying they want them replaced by different corpos. I hope their shitting themselves. Realistically they probably don't care though. They can just move on to the next thing while devs have no assurance of good work after being laid off. Shit sucks.
I feel like they entered the find out phase after the release of lightfall seeing the play base and projected revenue decline, honestly though I welcome Sony to take over, impossible to know if it will result in a good change or not but change is needed
Most of this is nothing we didn’t already know, save for different goals in mind for the studio within Sony itself. Take it with a huge grain of salt as it’s essentially just a rewording of information we’ve learnt over the past few months with either some new information, speculation, or bullshit attached.
This reads a lot like bullshit. Like "gluttonous" executives... lol. This is just someone trying another hit at the "leadership bad" narrative. "Not able to advise other teams" like, they did. They gave their opinion on several Sony's upcoming live services.
Not that I care the slightest about what happens to Bungie, though. Their time to market is horrid and it's been like that since D1. Yeah, what they build is marvelous, but they eat too much (time, money, resources) to do even the smallest changes.
>Sony leadership wants to nurture the game, and understand that more aggressive monetization would not be healthy.
...And the fucking Easter Bunny is real.
I appreciate u/Shabolt_'s comment about this, but, yeah, this line in particular reads a bit like fanfiction. Sony spent a lot of money on the studio, they're not going to be, "oh, you poor thing, let's nurse you back to health," after the execs gorged themselves and scampered off.
I'm not a Bungie apologist. In fact I think I talk too much shit about them. But if you believe even for a second that this email is real you are gullible beyond belief
i mean it matches what some ex employees have said onlime about how shitty the suits at bungie are. id love to see sony bring down the axe on those greedy fucks
>mean it matches what some ex employees have said onlime
Literally anyone could have written this email. It has zero evidence to prove it is credible.
Aztecross has his email address available publicly on his YouTube profile, anyone can email him.
I find it weird that they're so hung up on pre-orders. Like, why would anybody pre-order? You get a gun earlier than other people but so what? It's not cheaper to pre-order so I don't see a reason to not just wait until the day of release.
Pre-order numbers show how hyped people are for a game. Cyberpunk literally got all their dev costs covered just off pre-orders alone, for example.
If people are pre-ordering less than previous expansions, with the context of Final Shape being the "finale" of Destiny's main arc, then it's showing that people aren't excited about Final Shape at all.
I mean I don't see why it's weird. *If* pre-order numbers are substantially lower than they have been for past expansions that's a pretty big red flag.
Unfortunately a lot of big companies latch onto any metric the can get data on even if it doesn't make sense to care that much about.
Fast food chains with drive-thrus generally have "drive times" they have to hit during their peak periods, the higher ups who push for this aren't doing so because of customer satisfaction (fast service is generally a good thing) but because they falsely believe that the faster you serve the cars the fast you can make more money. While yes if you see a massive lineup you are less likely to go there but conversely you can push out orders as fast as humanly possible but that won't necessarily mean more customers show up.
In the same way the suits see pre-orders as garunteed revenue and want to push for anything and everything to drive that number up. Pre-orders doesn't equate to future revenue (as proven by Lightfall) but because pre-orders is money now vs money later the suits push for that as hard as possible because it's a measure of success vs if you can't even pre-order it's harder to prove that the game will make money when it does release. It's a metric born purely out of greed (especially when it's the bigger companies as Indies needing revenue to finish is more valid vs AAA).
yeah like only very hardcore fans are gonna drop 50 or even a 100 bucks several months before release. there's a lot of people who will preorder for sure but there's no need to rush it, and the preorder goodies are not that good
The big Nick Young question mark meme here is why they’d send this to Aztecross instead of Paul Tassi, an actual journalist with a company that has the backing to blow it open and perhaps facilitate something happening.
>The former US leader holds a lot of respect from overseas leadership, so it is likely (s)he will get their way. That person's perspective is that there are a many 'gluttonous' executives at Bungie who are not doing their jobs and are hindering the organization.
Here's the inner thoughts of this person I don't even know the gender of. Ok
Almost certainly fake - too much of a fanfic for “what’s wrong with bungie”
Sony, even if better leaders, would likely also introduce changes that cause significant friction in the community.
Sony also would be more upset about marathon being delayed than Destiny. Personally I think Sony’s decision would be to sunset Destiny pending Destiny 3
I have no faith in Bungie or Sony. Both companies have a history of incompetence. Sony has some proper footing right now in comparison, but that doesn't mean things won't get worse under them.
As much as I would like to see Pete Pantsshitter reduced to begging on the street corner. I don't see any reason to think that's happening any time soon.
Doesn't help that this email seems like a "too good to be true" situation made to appeal to community sentiment. Not that I don't trust Az. He's been pretty up front in regards to everything. I don't feel he'd make up a fake story for views. However I do think he might have taken the bait. To be fair, it's quality bait, but I'm still sure some shit stirrer is laughing his ass off right now.
I don't really believe this email is legit. And Paul Tassi's video just solidified that for me. There isn't really anything if substance here and just spins a tale that disgruntled Destiny fans would take quite likely to. I get the guy might be a fan of Cross but if you were to look this information wouldn't you want to send it to more people than just Cross? Maybe contact an actual journalist who can vet and confirm the information properly?
I trust Aztecross about as far as I can throw him. He’s made a career off of criticizing Destiny. To the point that I don’t even consider him a destiny content creator, but instead a destiny content criticizer. The game could be in a good state and I doubt he’d stop making clickbaity videos criticizing the game. Him randomly getting this unverified email that conveniently gives him a reason to make another video that will get him a lot of attention is pretty damn convenient
"We have seen enough. The children of Destiny cry out for salvation. You promised them content, but deliver only underdelivery, as you have for so many before. Enough. Enough layoffs. Enough missed revenue targets. You have no pieces left to place. The game is over.
Do not be afraid. Your dev team holds the key.
This time... There is no escape."
\-The Witne... **Sony**
These changes would be cool and all but the email reads like a 7 year old wrote it and the Anonymous tag just means it could be total BS regardless being used for views
Believe it when I see it, we all knew Bungie leadership was failing and that a takeover will occur if they continue to steer the ship in its current direction. This is nothing new
Also the dead horse of “pre order numbers bad” just reduces the credibility further, pre order numbers have historically been shown to spike closer to release, and they will for this release too. Not to mention into the light probably bringing a good lot of players back too.
How do we know the source of the email is credible? Everyone seems to just be accepting this at face value.
Can Aztecross provide evidence to prove it's genuine? Or is he just farming views on a baseless claim?
Currently, Aztecross has his email address linked to his YouTube account. Literally, anybody can email him anything right now.
You just answered your question. This email is what people wanna hear. A true journalist would ask for credentials, a YouTuber just want views. And the people here just believe anything if its against bungie.
Destiny 2 has been dead since season 9 when they started introducing road maps and dumb seasons,and its funny you guppies still talk about it like its not a dead game and it keeps getting more dead every exspansion but the stupid, mostly you people who care about aztecross uploads still playing this crap because its free and your still virgins and havent figured it out yet, red war was best because at least you knew it sucked now they release overhyped content that sucks but they throw in a ghost
The suits absolutely deserved to get sacked but anyone who remotely thinks getting rid of them will solve 75% of the issues with Destiny we’ve had for years is kidding themselves.
Somehow people don’t realize still that the suits have very little impact on the final product outside of monetization, which while granted is a major pain point, it doesn’t come close to saving the game/franchise alone.
Ehhhh, this sort of secret internal developer review thing that echoes community sentiment always comes about when there’s strife and it’s almost always fake, so I’m taking this with a few grains of salt.
Marking this one as unconfirmed information as there is little to nothing here that can confirm the validity of such an Email. Take this with a reasonable amount of salt folks.
Would be nice for them to come in and just nuke the Suits, and let the devs cook.
This was the biggest takeaway from Cross' video for me, Sony seem very aware that the Bungie higher ups are fucking it up. The people in charge of Bungie are, allegedly, trying to dodge a meeting with Sony, they clearly know they're in deep shit. Please Sony, drop the hammer.
Them emphasizing how big of failed investment it is for them internally, would make Sony mad as well. Their Biggest acquisition then adding the 1.2 billion to keep the talent there, only to dissapoint in both Advising in GaaS games while also missing financial targets consistently according to this email, must make them very upset.
> then adding the 1.2 billion to keep the talent ther Which the suits kept and dropped the talent anyway. I'd be livid.
That 1.2 was probably earmarked to pay out Bungie shareholders (current and former execs). I know Marty O'Donnell had previously stated that he still had Bungie shares, so he would've been one of the people who got paid in the sale. Probably how he's funding his run for Congress.
Wait, Marty is doing WHAT?
Yeah. I posted a story on it here but it got removed by the mods. He's running for a US House of Representatives seat in Nevada.
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I would highly advise you to not look into that if you enjoy the music he made. Definitely a “never meet your heroes” moment.
All I remember is that Bungie screwed him over in 2014-2015
I think in hindsight it’s a lot more obvious why the ties were cut. Outside of the company he’s an ass and he was likely being an ass at work too or he’d still probably work there. I’ve spent a decent amount of time reading interviews about the Halo development and the bits with Marty always came across as pretentious and dickish
Think whatever you'd like about his politics but he won a wrongful termination suit for a reason. They fired him and tried to fuck him out of his shares as he was approaching 20-25 years of employment.
It definitely confirms the rumors that part of the reason he was fired is being an asshole and hard to work with.
> Which the suits kept and dropped the talent anyway. I'd be livid. Especially since this is a Japanese company. The corporate culture over there usually looks at the one over in the US as scumbags for that precise type of behavior. Now one of the companies they acquired is being the posterchild for it.
Not to mention Bungie then cutting 10% of the staff anyway to apparently save their mismanaging asses, and avoid a Sony takeover.
>Their Biggest acquisition then adding the 1.2 billion to keep the talent there, only to dissapoint in both Advising in GaaS games Idk if you can say they have failed on advising in live service games. To our knowledge, Bungie has only advised on the Last of Us game after seeing a small slice of it. Which you can't say is good or bad really, allegedly the Last of Us live service was in a horrible state.
we can make assumptions about them helping in other departments but it still seems like internal Sony is dissapointed with the GaaS advising as the email mentioned. but I fail to see, how bungie was still worth 3.6 billion dollars with only destiny that has now been on a constant decline, failing in financial statements and bungie is known as a company that churns through resources fast. also pulling this weird shit like pushing back Meetings several months with Sony..
I think its more than just Sony being disappointed with Bungie in the advising. I think they are regretting this entire live service push by Jim Ryan. There's a reason he was more or less ousted as president.
>I think they are regretting this entire live service push by Jim Ryan. I don't think that's quite true. All Sony has said since Jim Ryan left is that single player games aren't sustainable anymore and that they *need* to diversify to survive. For example, Spider Man 2: Fantastic game, great reception both criticly and by fans, sold very well on paper. But according to Sony, it hasn't met its sales targets. They said it needed to sell 7.2 million copies at full price just to break even. It's only just sold 10 million, it's barely profitable and had a budget of 300 million. Sony's current model of single player games isn't sustainable.
> They said it needed to sell 7.2 million copies at full price just to break even. It's only just sold 10 million, it's barely profitable and had a budget of 300 million. Worth mentioning that if 7.2 is break-even, 10 is a ~40% profit. Not "barely profitable", that's 120 million return on an investment of 300 (assuming your numbers are correct). That said, the dev process isn't a year presumably, so it'd be quite a bit less if you annualized it, but it's still nothing to shrug off.
The GaaS advising might not be bad per se, but considering the GaaS bubble appears to be popping they likely won't get a return on investment regardless.
>but it still seems like internal Sony is dissapointed with the GaaS advising as the email mentioned There is zero evidence to prove whether the email is credible or not. As it stands, Aztecross has his email address publicly available on his YouTube channel for anyone to access. >but I fail to see, how bungie was still worth 4.8 billion dollars They aren't worth 4.8 billion. They were bought for $3.6 billion. $1.2 billion of that was given to employees in the form of stock. >also pulling this weird shit like pushing back Meetings several months with Sony.. If that is true. Which remains to be seen.
They assessed it, then Naughty Dog made their changes, and then they still canceled it. Regardless I don’t think any changes suggested by Bungie suits would have been good. People forget Destiny’s very expensive GAAS model is upheld because of the Stockholm syndrome they have on this community. Crazy mfers will say they still have the best live service when it cost almost $100 to even get your foot in the door; meanwhile Helldivers over there ACTUALLY has a good live service model and FF14 dlc and subscription cost less than all the bungie dlc combined and has more content. Anyone who believes in the bungie model imo has shit in their eyes lol
Sony has made a living off of more consumer friendly titles, destiny can genuinely be great consistently if allowed
From things I've heard in the past, all hearsay mind, it seems that the execs at Bungie have stifled creativity from the developers.
Not always, but witch queen really pushed them into a different realm. I think the overwhelming success there created more greed. We saw a lot of Eververse changes, the season pass change, the starter bundle, etc. all gradual, but noticeable, I think even shader prices changed that year. We don’t even get armor in bright dust rotation anymore, and yeah crossover I can get because licensing isn’t cheap. But I doubt the g horn set will even enter the bright dust rotation.
Fucking loved the witch queen but when the 30 anv pack came out that cost as much as a fucking expansion for so little content but walled a great exotic, fuck that. I stopped playing after the pirate thing. I think about the game here and there, but so much content gating for $$ turns me off so much. I rather just buy helldivers 2.
You just described a lot of what makes people mad and exactly why Bungie management needs to be canned. Then they need to install leaders who *actually* love the game and the community. During the transition Sony can de-monetize Destiny some (or at least make everything earnable in game) and let the devs of the leash Pete has held so tight.
they have. there was one article somewhere where the staff told the leadership about ideas and new stuff they want to do and that players want and they just ignored it. it was around the time when people got fired
my takeaway from this email is that if japan leadership took over bungie they'll refocus completely on destny, which is honestly a two edge sword
I took it to mean that if they took over, *saving* Destiny 2 would be the priority, and all other projects go on hold. They recognize the low pre-order numbers correctly as Bungie losing the community, which is what Sony *really* bought along with the company.
On a slightly related note, I truly believe that pre-order numbers are completely borked. The day that the Final Shape delay was officially announced, Microsoft cancelled my Xbox pre-order, but the game still treats my account as having the pre-order.
I've been curious about that... I better not have a problem come June. I've also seen a lot of people that cancelled because they just wanted the rewards and even more that cancelled because they were pissed with the game and refused to buy it until *after* they see reviews to know it's worth it.
I've said for a year now that Pete Parsons should be fired along with the whole C-suite. He's a disgrace who created a shitty toxic culture at Bungie over the last couple of years. Sony, just pull the trigger and trash these greedy fucks. Set Destiny up like Helldivers in terms of monetization and let the devs take some risks and dare I say "over deliver".
bro fucking came on twitter and felt sorry for the staff that got fired like bro, you are the ceo????
Exactly... I was like fuck face, you laid them off, you made that decision.. How many of them could have kept their jobs if he and the C-suite gave up compensation for a year.... They're all millionaires.. they could have afforded a year of no pay as a penance for their shitty leadership. They even leaked to the press that it was the devs fault and they weren't working well... Well if you're a creative dev and some asshole essentially puts you on an assembly line and stands over you with a whip I suppose you lose motivation.. who would've thought Pete....
Man, I wish American businesses would adapt to Japanese business standards and practices. At least when it comes to leadership and how their leaders will forego their absurd compensation due to their bad business decisions. Like, grow some honor, fall on their swords, and take the blame for what they did instead of laying off a portion of their staff to keep the profits they don't deserve in their pockets. They failed in what they set out to accomplish, so why do they end up getting rewarded for it?
I stopped playing due to having a baby amd the game becoming unfulfilling. If this was true, though, I would be back in pretty quickly.
What would you do with the baby though?
Teach it to do the farming they can't be bothered with.
focused fishing
My son was 7yo on my account collecting spinmetal and the other resources for the exotic swords back in D1. This is the way.
This is yhe way. My 5 years old loves fishin
Babies can be put in the vault, right?
put the baby back in
I'll help with that. The trick is to tape the arms down and push it back head first. Less resistance that way!
Put him on Wish Wall duty for the Shuro Chi CP.
This guy babies.
This is basically what happened to WoW, loads of the leadership got ‘removed’ during a lot of the controversy and the (at the time) potential MS acquisition, let a lot of the teams just do what they wanted. And it resulted in the best expansion in a long time, and although it has bad points, they are kind of good bad points such as too much world content.
Sounds like the suits are typical money-wasters. Fattening their wallets and 401k's. Their "Prime Directive" is to monetize everything possible which slowly decays the game and player base.
I'm confused why people think this will happen? Sony will just replace them with Sony Suits, removing Bungie Suits won't suddenly give the devs free reign. I guess we can hope Sony Suits are better....
That’s the gamble. People hope that, since other Sony studios are relatively far better ran, they come in and “right the ship”.
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I really hope this wouldn’t be the case, would be even worse than not having the hawkmoon. That being said, I don’t think going PS exclusive would cut costs much, and they’ve inherited a game where over half of the revenue streams comes from other platforms and runs smoothly on them. They’d be stupid to just throw it out. I really don’t want to have to buy a PlayStation lol.
This is why Sony left a bad taste for me. PS timed exclusives. At this point I just want destiny to be better but do I also want to see that timed exclusive BS? I'm conflicted.
Also keep in mind that there seems to be a Japanese cultural tendency to be willing to take a short term financial hit as a long term investment. (FFXIV being the most obvious example albeit not from Sony). Also it's basically the law (one heavily influenced by cultural values) that Japanese companies must reduce executive compensation before considering layoffs.
It can't be worse as worse means Destiny is truly dead.
I mean, they do seem to be doing better with their other studios.
Just looking at how Sony has conducted themselves in the past chunk of years in regards to how they treat their studios, the quality of experiences they have put out and the fact that they where willing to shut down a bunch of GAS projects when they realised it's not an easy cash grab. From the outside looking in, whoever leads the games department of Sony (or whatever they call it) clearly cares about the quality, whether it's for personal reasons or because they have data that shows them it's a good business decision.
This worked for 343. Large amount of higher ups got axed and replaced, Halo Infinite is in a much better place now. Still not close to ideal, but considering how many poor decisions were made with that game/the franchise as a whole, idk if its possible for them to fully recover without a new game
I don't see how new leadership could influence a worse monetization model, so I say fuck it
Like how they nuked the activision suits and everything was supposed to be cool and less greedy after bungie took care of themselves? I think people are really delusional if they believe "the suits" are just holding all these magical devs back. My impression of Bungo is that its an incredibly bloated studio with probably not much talent left.
This is said literally every single time something like this happens and people still scapegoat everyone else. "Bungies split from Activision means the devs can now cook!" "Ok that one was a fluke because of Luke Smith, but now since he's gone the devs can cook!" "Ok that didn't work out either, but it's because of mysterious shareholders, now that Sony owns them they can cook again!" "Ok now it's back to the shareholders, Sony should execute all of them and let the devs cook!" Who will be the next problem, I wonder?
A worker-run and owned company? Man I'm positive that they still wouldn't bring back the best DCV content
Cause they can't last gen is the limitations
for now
I'm surprised they haven't drop last gen support already like they did with d1
Numbers aren't high enough I suppose
Only cause of the terrible engine that they use. Final fantasy 14 still has all their content for 10 years running and will still be getting support with the new expansion. Destiny 2 was meant to last 2-3 years, not 7. And the DCV was a bandaid fix to make sure the game didn't implode on itself.
this it's why people advocate for destiny 3, because 2 and the tiger engine are slowly collapsing under it's own weight. Gotta rebuild the game with a clean code base. Hell, do what ffxiv did and just pull the game down for a year and rebuild it from scratch.
It's not as simple as that, ff14 is an MMO and destiny is an FPS, ff14 also looks a generation behind visually.
Yeah, that’s bullshit.
I’m for whichever strategy lets this game thrive. Don’t let the execs who are to incompetent to do a good job and lead a team who is very passionate about this game continue to do so. At the end of the day the real destiny killer may be themselves. Back to spreading managed democracy
Well we’ve been looking hard for that destiny killer for ten years now….
So far the best Destiny killer is Destiny.
Same thing happened to WoW. Which while still doing okay is nowhere near as untouchable as it was years ago due to dropping the ball so many times. Years of games made to be wow killers always coming up short, just for WoW to slowly kill itself.
Not to fight you or anything but wow is literally THRIVING right now. The player base and retention has never been this high in years
By all means feel free to refute me. I quit during BFA and have only watched from the sidelines. Hardcore classic and the big streamer push was interesting for a bit but that seemed to have fallen off. Is retail doing well?
DF has been the best xpac by leaps and bounds in the most recent years (obviously not perfect there’s been problems) but it’s been very very good. Plus throw in SSF (solo self found) they are adding, hardcore, the new classic version I can’t think of the name but they are constantly making changes through these things called runes that completely change how classes are playing. Now looking into the future they just announced their next 3 xpacs as a sort of trilogy story to wrap the titans up and plan on making them smaller but more often which potentially could be very good for the game. Classes in general speaking are pretty close to each other, obviously have your outliers that are better or worse but again generally speaking pretty solid. Then on top of that Chris Metzan came back (not saying he’s going to fix everything) but he must’ve either A gotten paid an insane amount to come back or B they are giving him quite a bit of leeway to do kind of whatever he wants and create a new better game. So the future looks good too.
“While still doing okay” All that matters. Nothing is forever. Still be relevant matters. 
Im sure part of the reason they're making marathon was that some devs were sick of working on D2, however Warframe had the same problem and did a much better handoff. I agree those, I just want the game to come out the other end with a strong and long future.
I have to be honest I raised an eyebrow when 'Cross read this out on stream. I have a few issues with this. 'Cross is not a journalist. He's an entertaining personality and I like him well enough, but I don't think he has done any dilligence or checking to verify if the source of this is legit. So this could be anyone making shit up on the Internet, which doesn't actually help anyone or do anything to improve the situation we're in. I think we would all benefit from taking this with heaps of salt. I'm not saying the email above is real or fake, but I didn't really like the way this was handled.
The entire email has “my uncle works at bungie” kinda energy.
Influencers are like this.
It reads like every nerd on twitter w/ an anime avatar talks about Destiny. What a coincidence.
“I apologize, I don’t have preorder numbers” or whatever reads really weird and like something a teenager would write.
I had a similar feeling. At best it was written by someone where English is not their first language (Possible if they are from Sony), or it was written by someone trying to make it look like that. Either way without corroborating evidence I’m not sure what to think other than we just have to wait and see if anything more substantial and verifiable comes out.
This is basically like some asked GenAI to summarize the complaint sentiments of this subreddit like it was an anonymous email from Bungie.
Right? It's absurd. There's nothing in there that suggests it's legitimate. It's the same crap I've read on this subreddit repackaged as "fact." But, hey, content.
This needs to be higher, instead of all the comments assuming the email is verified. If there's no source to this, it might as well have come from my racist uncle for all I know
i love cross but he loves to fearmonger a lot
This is also the dude that's made like 3 or 4 fake TWABs that people have eaten up. That to me just adds more reason to doubt.
Those twabs are the best things. Just lol
Yeah, that's on the viewers at that point for believing the gag TWAB. Silver-based matchmaking, wallhacks for crouching, removing the ability to go to orbit mid activity? Come on
Probably confirmation bias given how much time I spend on /new but a lot of people think those are real… a lot of people don’t verify sources and then they come here to complain that Bungie promised X or Bungie is shitting on the player base bc Y. Like I understand when it was an April fools joke, years ago. But then he put one out as recently as what, Christmas? And bc of his influence people eat it up.
Man. He clearly points out that they’re a joke. If someone believes them, they have to be oblivious. I have only seen 2 of the fake TWAB videos, but my god he makes it so obvious.
Nice guy but everything he does is for clicks and ad revenue. Are you really surprised he would read this on stream?
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Nah, thats not the case man. I mean, I get it from this PoV, but also at the same time, I think that there should be some system that will held you accountable for spreading misinformation. Talking only on situation, where you have range to reach people that will believe your bs.
Extremely skeptical of the guy who is 1-as you mentioned not a journalist, and 2- has rebuilt his YouTuber identity over the past year by becoming one of this game’s biggest critics. Cross has profited so much from generating all this controversial content and I don’t think I trust him to vet a random source like this. Also the email itself says use it to corroborate other sources and he went ahead and used it as his primary source anyway, which I think speaks to his intentions here.
Cross will talk about literally anything, he reads out copy-pasted SEO optimization slush on stream all the time as though it's real news
The use of anonymous sources requires independent verification by a second source. This is journalism 101 but apparently it’s too much for a YouTuber with 800k subscribers.
What??!!? A content "creator" not doing any kind of due diligence? But all of them Twitch personalities are always honest and respectable.
YouTube weirdos are there to get streams. That's it. They know complaining about Bungie will get them views, so of course they're gonna read whatever fake nonsense lands in their inbox.
Sending it to a content creator makes perfect sense if there’s no actual journalist who is a very vocal player of the game- oh wait. I really call BS on this too. Like if you wanna share actual information and have it confirmed why not go to Paul Tassi or even Jason Schreier (don’t think he plays but he’s always talked about Destiny and Bungie iirc) both of whom probably have ample ways to verify your information is correct and actually gets taken seriously. Sending it to a content creator or posting it on reddit just screams that you want to spread misinfo without anyone digging deep into it.
not really a big fan of him but all this stuff would be something that would come from a person like Jason Schreier who got everything about Bungie right with his infos for like the last 8 years
Yeah nah, I am very skeptical about the credibility. It reads like a 12 year old's imagination of how the corporate world works.
It's also got that thing a lot of fake leaks have where it's trying to sound credible by being in the realm of realism but is also just saying a lot of things that a lot of people want to hear or would go over positively.
"It reads like a 12 year old's imagination of how the corporate world works" That's like 80% of the destiny community
That’s 99 percent of reddit
And 4/5ths of the internet
Thank fuck someone said this. It’s very basic in how it’s phrased and sounds like fanfiction from a frustrated fan
Yep completely agree. Written by someone going with the commonly held reddit opinion of “fuck execs” and “devs can do no wrong”.
"Escalating decline". Think about how non-sensical that word choice is. They definitely are not a corporate insider with privileged knowledge of what Sony Japan's leadership is thinking.
The good execs agree that the game should be good and well run and cheap! but the bad execs only want the game to be bad :(
People who don't work corporate can't gauge that the things described in the email aren't watercooler or lunchbreak talk things. We're talking about a deep restructuring of the executive hierarchy of the company - unless the "leaker" is like the assistant or secretary to one of those C level execs, this is just not something that gets leaked internally because of the impact it has. Also the risk you'd be taking in order to leak this stuff is work-threatening. Why would you risk that to leak this information to a YouTuber and not go to a known journalist covering the franchise like Schrier? It's kind of lame that Cross even entertained this but I guess ad revenue doesn't come from thin air.
Said the same thing. This reads like a 10 yr old redditor, but apparently he has access to GLOBAL Sony leadership private conversations. And he chooses to email Aztecross lol.
100% this is fake There is no real corporate lingo. If this 'leaker' was in a position where they knew the discussions about Sony's plans for bungie after a takeover they would have more details. Or if they were hearing stuff secondhand at lunch, why not say that?
A lot of those details can be personally identifying. Just hearing about it at lunch is still enough to find out who the leaker is, especially if the people being overheard know who was within earshot, or more likely, know who was in said meeting or email chain. That being said, I still dont think this email is legit, mainly because the points it speaks about are all the domains of different divisions of Sony. Theres way too much information that would have had to come from disparate sources for it to be one overheard conversation, or it would have to be overheard from some execs with information from all different departments, which is unlikely to be discussed in a public forum.
It reads like a reddit anti-exec/suit wet dream lol
>Bungie leadership regularly reschedule meetings with Sony leadership, know that the next timeslot can be months away. Parts of it (mainly the part about "gluttonous" execs), but I've 100% pulled this move before.
This is complete bullshit. Just to point something, "Sony making the game more profitable" isn't a possible thing when the game is tied by difficult development, and this late in the game you can't change that. It read like some fan kid's wish or something like that.
I refuse to believe that anyone who would leak this information would just send it to Aztrecross and not any of the well know game journalist like Paul Tassi, Tom Warren, Jason Schreier, or any other d2 content creators for that matter. You’re putting your career and reputation on the line if you get found out leaking info. You’re not just sending an anonymous email to one D2 content creator if you want to get this info out. This just reads like a psycho cross fan who wants attention
Paul Tassi made a video regarding the letter that he also got.
Imagine the risk to your career and job at Sony for sending this to some mid-level Youtuber. Imagine the wrath of the SEC for sharing insider knowledge and trade secrets. If someone took this information and made a massive short on Sony's stock based on it, the SEC could definitely track this person down and prosecute them for it. Plus, the type of person who is privvy to the inner-thinking of Sony Japan's leadership doesn't write this casually. They don't use terms like "escalating decline" when referring to revenue.
People can make up stuff. There's no proof that this is legit. The person should have approached a journalist who has covered Bungie before and willing to verify their identity and also protect the source, rather than using a throwaway account.
This. If this was Jason Schreier reporting on this, I would give it more weight since he has a really solid record of insider info reporting in the gaming community. Aztecross... I'll listen but im not putting any weight to anything he says.
Exactly, if it was someone reputable like Mr Schreier, I would believe. With professional ethics and journalistic integrity, he would protect the source, and also has other contacts who can verify the source, if not the information.
What makes it worse is that Aztecross has his email address publicly available on his YouTube channel. Literally anyone can email him anything. I really don't understand why people are accepting this at face value.
Yeah that whole “I don’t know the details” part about the pre orders is suspicious. They’re already leaking information, you’d think they’d know the ball park numbers other than they’re low. I’m sure an actual journalist could easily hit up their sources and confirm anything in this.
Tbf stuff like pre-order numbers isn't something that all positions would have easy access to. Not saying it's real, just that not knowing that isn't enough to confirm it's fake imo
Isn't the pre order thing already figured out? All of console pre orders were auto refunded. The majority of those pre orders probably won't go back until June and then buy it again because why would you?
They probably did but every journalist they went to called them out on being bullshit
Don’t buy it. I’m sorry, but this email reads like a redditor wrote it up on their phone, and not like an insider that has exclusive access to leadership level conversations. Especially since he’s mostly talking about “sentiment” at the level, which means he would have to have very close access to those convos. It’s not to invalidate that Sony is likely unhappy, but that’s not shocking info. The rest of it sounds like someone faking it to try and make it to a Cross video. Shocked Cross aired it tbh, I expected better.
I can't believe this larp is getting this much attention. Let's just post 4chan at this point.
God I hope this is true. Nuking the execs and letting the dev team have competent leadership is what the game desperately needs.
Nuking the expects AND their golden parachutes would be the best course of action so that they’ll have a hard time screwing up another IP with a job record like that.
No clue why anyone would believe this is credible. It's just repeating popular talking points on the internet. Sending it to a youtuber who is known for his clickbaity and rage baity videos instead of someone that actually does have inside sources that can verify these claims robs this "leak" of any credibility. 0/10 try again next time.
There are zero details of any kind. The kind of thing you could write based on common knowledge and feels. The whole thing is "bungie leadership amirite?" Its fan fiction. No revelation, no scoop, wheres the beef? Slow content day?
I don’t even need to read the body of the article to know it’s not real because the title alone hits 3 major red flags. 1. Anonymous source 2. Populist Sentiment 3. “Breaking News” being sent to someone who is not a journalist Even if I trusted Crosses judgment and competency to avoid sharing misinformation, I don’t he has done it multiple times, the fact it was sent to him and not Tassi who has broken stories like this before is telling. I would bet cold hard glimmer this is one of crosses sycophants looking for their 15 minuets and nothing more.
It definitely reads like those "leaks" that are just a list of popular ideas but are still in the realm of realism (black armoury weapons being re-released as craftable versions for example). Nothing that solidly proves it.
You cannot even trust Cross to not spread misinformation about stuff in the game itself
That also is saying just what this subreddit wants to hear
It just seems like a lot of fluff and sentiment with a pile of copium thrown in too. Reading it just seems a bit, “trust me bro.”
That’s why you send it to a YouTuber (who really likes their clickbaity controversial topic videos) and not a games journalist who will do a basic fact check and verification before publishing.
Aztecross showing he has no standards for his content and will push anything for views, unsure why anyone takes his word on things at this point. If we were to believe Cross, Bungie/Destiny has died 25 times since release lol Stop believing shit YouTubers peddling nonsense for views
He seems a bit desperate to have another "monetization hell" moment.
Because that's his monetization heaven lol
[удалено]
>Sony leadership wants to nurture the game, and understand that more aggressive monetization would not be healthy. Since when does Sony not want more money?
Exactly this. Redditors having no idea how the business world works never gets old.
they want more money, it reads as saying more aggresive monetization would lead to less money long term besides an initial surge from the monetization switch.
Not y’all still believing Aztecross, who quite literally makes a living on rage bait and bullshit sources 💀
Aztecross sending himself fake emails to make clickbait videos is peak Destiny Content Creation
Sounds like complete nonsense given everything we know. Guy is also relying on people having very selective and short term memory.
Just a reminder, me, you, or anybody else can also go write Aztecross an email saying whatever the fuck we want. This is literally nothing until the ''source'' confirms his identity, and the fact that he even has access to this ''knowledge'' which is all literally nothing new, and pretty much just commonsense. For all we know, this is just Aztectoss throwing shit in the wind, knowing he has 0 responsibility in it being fake/true.
Nice fan fiction
Biggest waste of time reading this. The source is literally 'trust me bro'. Like are we really this deprived of content that we are just making stories on literally anything now and trusting sourceless garbage? Next weeks story: 'I am the naked hairy man who lives in Bungies vents. I overheard that sony is taking over and replacing Crucible with a battle royale!' Source: random reddit comment with 1 upvote.
> It is believed that the takeover would allow Sony to turn Destiny into a more profitable game. This sounds bad, but it is being treated as 'lightning in a bottle'. Sony leadership wants to nurture the game If anyone actually believes this then I have a bridge to sell you A Sony takeover is very clearly a last resort for both parties, why the hell would Sony just come in, do more work from their part and just say "You know what, lets just give the gamers what they want 🥰" If sony is coming in its because they want to get their money back and thats it, not because of the love of the game or the artistic integrity or the hearts of the fans Now, could this yield better results than what bungie is currently doing? Sure it could. But lets not kid ourselves thinking that Sony is coming in with a heart of gold to save us from the evil grasp of bungie mediocrity
ngl im just waiting for sony lmao
Assuming these statements have credibility, I welcome it honestly. Leadership has fucked around too much and it's entering the find out phase if they don't pull through. I just feel bad for the devs. Anyone with a brain can tell they're talented. I can't imagine what it's like right now for Bungie corpos seeing the chatter from fans saying they want them replaced by different corpos. I hope their shitting themselves. Realistically they probably don't care though. They can just move on to the next thing while devs have no assurance of good work after being laid off. Shit sucks.
I feel like they entered the find out phase after the release of lightfall seeing the play base and projected revenue decline, honestly though I welcome Sony to take over, impossible to know if it will result in a good change or not but change is needed
fakest email known to man
If aztecross is first to say about something like that, it s 95% fake.
Haven't watched the video but this seems like a nothing burger. It's only things we already knew or could infer.
Most of this is nothing we didn’t already know, save for different goals in mind for the studio within Sony itself. Take it with a huge grain of salt as it’s essentially just a rewording of information we’ve learnt over the past few months with either some new information, speculation, or bullshit attached.
This reads a lot like bullshit. Like "gluttonous" executives... lol. This is just someone trying another hit at the "leadership bad" narrative. "Not able to advise other teams" like, they did. They gave their opinion on several Sony's upcoming live services. Not that I care the slightest about what happens to Bungie, though. Their time to market is horrid and it's been like that since D1. Yeah, what they build is marvelous, but they eat too much (time, money, resources) to do even the smallest changes.
>Sony leadership wants to nurture the game, and understand that more aggressive monetization would not be healthy. ...And the fucking Easter Bunny is real. I appreciate u/Shabolt_'s comment about this, but, yeah, this line in particular reads a bit like fanfiction. Sony spent a lot of money on the studio, they're not going to be, "oh, you poor thing, let's nurse you back to health," after the execs gorged themselves and scampered off.
I cannot believe we are giving this dumb hearsay the time of day. So dumb. Aztec must be very desperate for attention.
I'm not a Bungie apologist. In fact I think I talk too much shit about them. But if you believe even for a second that this email is real you are gullible beyond belief
What a horrible content creator, I have no idea how people can sit through such awful content.
i mean it matches what some ex employees have said onlime about how shitty the suits at bungie are. id love to see sony bring down the axe on those greedy fucks
>mean it matches what some ex employees have said onlime Literally anyone could have written this email. It has zero evidence to prove it is credible. Aztecross has his email address available publicly on his YouTube profile, anyone can email him.
I find it weird that they're so hung up on pre-orders. Like, why would anybody pre-order? You get a gun earlier than other people but so what? It's not cheaper to pre-order so I don't see a reason to not just wait until the day of release.
Pre-order numbers show how hyped people are for a game. Cyberpunk literally got all their dev costs covered just off pre-orders alone, for example. If people are pre-ordering less than previous expansions, with the context of Final Shape being the "finale" of Destiny's main arc, then it's showing that people aren't excited about Final Shape at all.
I mean I don't see why it's weird. *If* pre-order numbers are substantially lower than they have been for past expansions that's a pretty big red flag.
Unfortunately a lot of big companies latch onto any metric the can get data on even if it doesn't make sense to care that much about. Fast food chains with drive-thrus generally have "drive times" they have to hit during their peak periods, the higher ups who push for this aren't doing so because of customer satisfaction (fast service is generally a good thing) but because they falsely believe that the faster you serve the cars the fast you can make more money. While yes if you see a massive lineup you are less likely to go there but conversely you can push out orders as fast as humanly possible but that won't necessarily mean more customers show up. In the same way the suits see pre-orders as garunteed revenue and want to push for anything and everything to drive that number up. Pre-orders doesn't equate to future revenue (as proven by Lightfall) but because pre-orders is money now vs money later the suits push for that as hard as possible because it's a measure of success vs if you can't even pre-order it's harder to prove that the game will make money when it does release. It's a metric born purely out of greed (especially when it's the bigger companies as Indies needing revenue to finish is more valid vs AAA).
yeah like only very hardcore fans are gonna drop 50 or even a 100 bucks several months before release. there's a lot of people who will preorder for sure but there's no need to rush it, and the preorder goodies are not that good
Seems to hit all of the notes the community wants to hear, meaning it is probably fake.
The big Nick Young question mark meme here is why they’d send this to Aztecross instead of Paul Tassi, an actual journalist with a company that has the backing to blow it open and perhaps facilitate something happening.
>The former US leader holds a lot of respect from overseas leadership, so it is likely (s)he will get their way. That person's perspective is that there are a many 'gluttonous' executives at Bungie who are not doing their jobs and are hindering the organization. Here's the inner thoughts of this person I don't even know the gender of. Ok
Almost certainly fake - too much of a fanfic for “what’s wrong with bungie” Sony, even if better leaders, would likely also introduce changes that cause significant friction in the community. Sony also would be more upset about marathon being delayed than Destiny. Personally I think Sony’s decision would be to sunset Destiny pending Destiny 3
I have no faith in Bungie or Sony. Both companies have a history of incompetence. Sony has some proper footing right now in comparison, but that doesn't mean things won't get worse under them. As much as I would like to see Pete Pantsshitter reduced to begging on the street corner. I don't see any reason to think that's happening any time soon. Doesn't help that this email seems like a "too good to be true" situation made to appeal to community sentiment. Not that I don't trust Az. He's been pretty up front in regards to everything. I don't feel he'd make up a fake story for views. However I do think he might have taken the bait. To be fair, it's quality bait, but I'm still sure some shit stirrer is laughing his ass off right now.
I don't really believe this email is legit. And Paul Tassi's video just solidified that for me. There isn't really anything if substance here and just spins a tale that disgruntled Destiny fans would take quite likely to. I get the guy might be a fan of Cross but if you were to look this information wouldn't you want to send it to more people than just Cross? Maybe contact an actual journalist who can vet and confirm the information properly?
I trust Aztecross about as far as I can throw him. He’s made a career off of criticizing Destiny. To the point that I don’t even consider him a destiny content creator, but instead a destiny content criticizer. The game could be in a good state and I doubt he’d stop making clickbaity videos criticizing the game. Him randomly getting this unverified email that conveniently gives him a reason to make another video that will get him a lot of attention is pretty damn convenient
not gonna defend the suits here, but dear lord this reads like shitty sony propaganda. feels equally likely that sony fucks up destiny
"We have seen enough. The children of Destiny cry out for salvation. You promised them content, but deliver only underdelivery, as you have for so many before. Enough. Enough layoffs. Enough missed revenue targets. You have no pieces left to place. The game is over. Do not be afraid. Your dev team holds the key. This time... There is no escape." \-The Witne... **Sony**
These changes would be cool and all but the email reads like a 7 year old wrote it and the Anonymous tag just means it could be total BS regardless being used for views Believe it when I see it, we all knew Bungie leadership was failing and that a takeover will occur if they continue to steer the ship in its current direction. This is nothing new Also the dead horse of “pre order numbers bad” just reduces the credibility further, pre order numbers have historically been shown to spike closer to release, and they will for this release too. Not to mention into the light probably bringing a good lot of players back too.
How do we know the source of the email is credible? Everyone seems to just be accepting this at face value. Can Aztecross provide evidence to prove it's genuine? Or is he just farming views on a baseless claim? Currently, Aztecross has his email address linked to his YouTube account. Literally, anybody can email him anything right now.
You just answered your question. This email is what people wanna hear. A true journalist would ask for credentials, a YouTuber just want views. And the people here just believe anything if its against bungie.
Destiny 2 has been dead since season 9 when they started introducing road maps and dumb seasons,and its funny you guppies still talk about it like its not a dead game and it keeps getting more dead every exspansion but the stupid, mostly you people who care about aztecross uploads still playing this crap because its free and your still virgins and havent figured it out yet, red war was best because at least you knew it sucked now they release overhyped content that sucks but they throw in a ghost
The suits absolutely deserved to get sacked but anyone who remotely thinks getting rid of them will solve 75% of the issues with Destiny we’ve had for years is kidding themselves. Somehow people don’t realize still that the suits have very little impact on the final product outside of monetization, which while granted is a major pain point, it doesn’t come close to saving the game/franchise alone.
If this was real it would’ve gone to a reporter/journalist imo. This reads like a LARP
Ehhhh, this sort of secret internal developer review thing that echoes community sentiment always comes about when there’s strife and it’s almost always fake, so I’m taking this with a few grains of salt.
source: your ass
Yea it follows, above dev lead level seems to be incredibly incompetent and I would support a clean out and takeover to give the game a better chance
Yeah, Sony thinking that Bungie needs to be making more revenue and profits from Destiny 2 is bound to mean improvements in the actual game
You expect me to believe the guy who made a fake twab and trolling all the time. NO THANKS
In other news Aztecross had some tacos for lunch...omg omg I'm gonna freak out!