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Not sure why so many people need a conspiracy about why Destiny 2 shut down. It stopped making as much money, that's the drama. GaaS games require constant injections of money and that eventually dries up with competition or as tastes change. Every reinvention can fail or succeed...

If one or two seasons don't hit their numbers, the game is done with very little chance of coming back. No conspiracy.

It sucks. The game is still there for a while, probably going to pull in a million or two every month for a couple years, but that barely pays for the skeleton crew needed to keep it running and the infrastructure in the end.

Every couple months Bungie had a release that would compete in scope with most AAA games in quality and scope. It took almost a thousand people in two large teams constantly working on the next and next next seasons, leap frogging each other. They had to nail a banger each time and mostly did.

Covid brought this crazy bump in daily/monthly active users and people had some money to buy fun stuff while stuck at home. Covid settled down a lot and people put their money elsewhere. They didn't play games as much, spent money elsewhere, then inflation, this asshole POTUS, and AI, etc.

Money is gone for a lot of people now.

If you think Bungie didn't try to do anything to turn it around (and they did for months at a time) - why did it go free-to-play? Why did it go PC? Stadia? Most of those helped lengthen its lifespan and injected life into it. But you eventually run out of those dials and levers to pull.

But they had to pull some levers that pissed everyone off too. 9 yrs of a game, 4k textures, huge maps/content, you have to fit it all on a Playstation or Xbox, who's HDs aren't growing, or how they handle SKUs doesn't massively scale, so you vault stuff. You lose some players, now unfixable FOMO.

All the above and you're trying to grow too, you have multiple incubations, potential games, you put some of your best on those. They can iterate for years and years and the project might just be killed because it. won't. work. More money gone, DAU are going down, money slows, competitors, etc etc.

And all the while, people have less and less money.