The contract between Activision and Bungie set the stage for a decade of incredibly difficult game development. The fundamental issue that Destiny ran into from the start - the tension of being a live-service game that was originally set up to be a biannual franchise with an impossible DLC schedule - was set up here.
It’s hard to know what, exactly, Bungie was thinking when they signed this contract. The contract stipulated that Bungie were to release four Destiny games between 2013 and 2019, with an expansion release in between each game (each called a “Comet”), plus an unspecified amount of smaller DLC packs between those releases. The content roadmap set out here is as follows:
- Destiny 1 - Fall 2013
- Comet 1 - Fall 2014
- Destiny 2 - Fall 2015
- Comet 2 - Fall 2016
- Destiny 3 - Fall 2017
- Comet 3 - Fall 2018
- Destiny 4 - Fall 2019
- Comet 4 - Fall 2020
Bungie were obliged to provide three years of support for each game, including three years after Comet 4.
In this contract, Bungie maintained rights to the Destiny IP, a model that had been recently popularized by programs like EA Partners. They were obliged to work exclusively on Destiny through the release of Destiny 2, and until $375 million in revenue had been brought in. The one exception to this was a codename “Marathon,” which was allowed to have a very small number of employees on it until after Destiny 2 shipped, at which point Bungie were allowed to devote more resources to it.
There’s two additional funny/sad points: Bungie gave Activision a license to port Destiny to any platforms they saw fit, but specifically excluded Valve, Epic, or Gearbox from being hired to do this work. I have to say, even in 2010 I do not think Bungie had to worry about Valve or Epic wanting to do conversion work. That said, after Bungie’s experience with Gearbox on the Halo PC port, I fully understand why they called them out.
And, of course, as so many games did at the time (and likely still do): Bungie had a provision an additional bonus if Destiny 1 got a 90 on gamerankings.com. They ended up missing by a good 15 points or so.
I vaguely knew about this contract before I embarked on this project, but I had never read it in detail until now, and I am baffled by this content schedule. Both Activision and Bungie should have known better.
By 2010, Activision Call of Duty was in its full yearly release swing. However, Activision had specifically made a contract between Infinity Ward and Treyarch so that both would alternate years in releasing Call of Duty games - the games between 2006 and 2010 alternated between the two companies. Activision was fully aware it was an impossible ask to have a developer release a game every year.
Of course, this contract technically stipulated a game every two years, but the Comet expansions were clearly not going to take significantly fewer resources than a full game.
At this point, Activision also had merged with Blizzard. This was a relatively new merger, and so maybe they hadn’t had much time to examine the Blizzard business, but if they had, they would have noticed that World of Warcraft had not managed to put out an expansion every year. No one’s live service games were, short of, I suppose, EverQuest.
Looking at the previous decade of Bungie also showed no promise here. Halo 1 had famously taken four years to develop from its RTS roots, and Halo 2, a clearly incomplete game, took three years to develop, causing a legendary crunch for Bungie’s employees and the cancellation of a number of major features and other Bungie projects. Halo 3 had taken another three years.
Bungie did have a decent track record in expansions, with Halo 3: ODST releasing in 2009 and Halo: Reach releasing later in 2010. It’s possible this is what gave them the confidence to go forward with this contract, but they clearly underestimated the amount of increased work running a live service game entails.