Bungie has been quietly working on a non-Destiny new game for some time now, and today the studio acknowledged it for the first time, announcing a partnership with Chinese publisher NetEase that will raise them $US100 million ($132 million).
Screenshot: Destiny 2
“Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve entered into a new partnership with NetEase to help us explore new directions,” the company said on its website.
“With their industry expertise, they will empower us to build new worlds and invite players, new and old, to join us there. They will help us support separate teams inside Bungie to bring our newest ambitions to life.”
Although the blog post doesn’t mention the number, Bungie told The Wall Street Journal that NetEase has made a whopping $US100 million ($132 million) investment in the longrunning studio.
“If you’re a player of Destiny, this news won’t impact the hobby you’ve come to know. Destiny is an experience that will grow for many years to come. We’ll continue to work with our partners at Activision to foster this global community and turn new players from all over the world into Guardians. Our commitment to that world is not diminished by this announcement. We have exciting plans for the future of the Destiny franchise, and you’ll learn more about the next steps we’ll take together in the weeks to come.”
NetEase, a Chinese internet company, is best known in the gaming sphere for publishing Minecraft and most of Blizzard’s games in China. This appears to be its biggest move yet in Western gaming.
Bungie also said yesterday that it will announce news on Destiny 2‘s spring expansion next Wednesday during a live stream.
Comments
13 responses to “Bungie Gets $132 Million For New Non-Destiny Game”
Ha! So that’s why all the reskins & lack of content in Destiny 2, This is going to go over real well with their core franchise customers.
Nah I’m pretty sure that’s just Destiny anyway.
rubbish, there has always been a reskin culture in Destiny. People act like its a new thing for them. Nope. EG They remember IB as always having new gun models every season, nope. With a few odd exceptions all guns in IN were reskins until RoI. But no everytime we get reskins in D2 IB, they say we ‘always had new guns’ nope.
There has never been a lack of content problem in D2. A lack of fitting rewards to make the content we have more desirable to replay but never a lack of content. (well other than CoO being too small and a waste of some amazing art.
if gamers are too stupid to realise if a company is working on two games, that means they will actually have to hire more staff. It doesnt mean all their staff are suddenly fractured. The Destiny community and their knee jerk reactions have always been the worse part of the game/s, and given some of the rubbish Bungie has pulled that is saying a lot.
Maybe they were re-skins, but they looked pretty good with the iron banner theme, they also happened to be some of the best weapons in the game. Holders Hammer, Efrideets Spear, Felwinters Lie were pretty amazing. Combine this with the fact you could get so many different combinations of perks where as now every single weapon has 1 set build and if its crap it’s never going to get better.
The content issue has also been around since D1. Once you got all your raid gear, what else was there to do. We used to have ghosts/grimoire to chase at least as well as getting a specific roll on a weapon. But D2 neutered that along with a lot of other things in order to increase its mass appeal which made its flaws even more apparent. Hey they might fix it someday but you cant blame the community for their reactions because by now bungie has lost pretty much all credibility.
There have been plenty of interviews where game dev companies have stated they pull resources from other projects to make a new game; admittedly they also state it’s not an ideal situation and tends to happen only in the last quarter of game dev. People are reading this deal as trouble in the water for Destiny and I think that’s valid but for something totally different.
Bungie are teaming up with a new publisher – it’s quite rare for a game dev to work for two different competing publishers at the one time. If the relationship between Bungie and Activision is dysfunctional then people really should be concerned for the future of Destiny.
Destiny 2 was my first experience with Bungie and has made me very cautious of anything Bungie related in the future.
I doubt whatever they are working on will be treated with caution when release time comes because the gaming community has a lot of talk but very little walk.
Don’t bother arguing with him. He thinks Bungie are saints and that gamers are a bunch of entitled little twats because we want a working game that doesn’t try to hide how it’s systems work, and a developer that doesn’t say “I’ll change baby, I can be better” when it gets called out for it’s bullshit.
Destiny is such a joke.
They failed at destiny 2 so now they are getting more money to create a new game?
lolwut.
thats like saying Diablo 3 was a fail. Which in those first few months it kinda was if your expectations were high. Now look at it, it is every bit as fun as Diablo 2 but in differents ways (what a sequel should be) D2 is in a way better state now and starting to get back on track. The damage is only done is if you want it to be that way. We all know some gamers like to hold grudges, thankfully not all gamers are like that.
I was one of the biggest defenders of Destiny here in the comments section in the past, I totally agree that Destiny 1 went from a good game with a lot of promise to a great game with a lot of promise by the time The Taken King released.
But Destiny 2 doesn’t really deserve the patience we’ve been expected to give it. Destiny 1 had the consideration that it was a new game they were taking into uncharted console territory. It was fair to see all its faults and missteps as teething problems for a brand new console genre and IP.
But Destiny 2 is year 4 of this game, there shouldn’t be this many nonsensical problems with the game now. People say “oh but there was a different team working on it that started before even The Taken King came out, so that’s why some of the quality of life improvements to the game aren’t there yet”. But consumers don’t give a shit about these internal justifications. We bought a product, and the expectation is that it was going to be as least as good as the game that preceded it. And certainly that its list of features wouldn’t make it look like the prequel to game that came out before it!
In light of games like Fortnite, that updates at lightning speed and with a common sense level of transparency and communication with its audience, Bungie’s crimes are highlighted further. I’m cautiously optimistic for the September update, but Bungie has done massive damage to the Destiny brand.
The only question left is what does Bungie want to admit was the cause of this; arrogance, or ineptitude? Because they are the only two options that make sense at this point.
Bungie screwed up D1 and fixed it
WHY THE FLYING FUCK DID THEY DO THE SAME THING AGAIN WITH D2
Thankfully not all gamers are willfully ignorant to reality like you.
well because towards the end of D1 everyone was whining about shoulder chargers, grenades, having to level weapons, and having to level subclasses. And funny enough Bungie stupidly listened to those people, then sadly (even worse) they doubled down the changes with them. So much of the crap they bought into D2 was based on player feedback and yes Bungie made some huge mistakes themselves as well.
Bungie is the ‘devil you know’ there has not been a single thing about their actions since D2 that was surprising to me. They did the same all through D1. Yet so many gamers are in denial. I bought this game based on the fact, in spite of the things I hated in D1 and the rubbish they pulled, somehow it became my most played game ever. I bought in understanding this is who Bungie are, I dont agree with them, I dont like them but they are as predictable as clockwork and you call me wilfully ignorant, how about those people who seem to think any of their behaviour is actually new or unexpected?!!
The difference is Diablo 3 fixed their problems and revamped their game in response to criticism the first time round.
Bungie repeated all the mistakes they had already made in D1 and is now fixing them for the second time around. I really wanted D2 to be something special, because I was willing to forgive a lot in D1 because I believed the sequel would make the experience better not worse. That was my fault entirely, it was a belief I had in Bungie as a developer.
Now I am cynical about the decisions they make and will assess everything far more critically than may be normal because my experience tells me to expect the worst. I am fairly sure I am not alone in this assessment.
That being said Bungie is well within their rights to pursue options for new IPs and hopefully they can make more of it than the Destiny franchise. I still think they made a good FPS, but I was drawn in by the hope of something greater.
Fingers crossed they’re making Halo 4!
Good for them, looking to branch out and find a new, different audience to disappoint. 🙂
I just got into Destiny after Humble had it on sale and it’s a genuinely fun game if you just play it occasionally. I think they’ve got to rethink their business model though. There’s no way they can continually release enough new content every expansion to make the weekly reset system feel that rewarding. All their stuff is just crazy polished relative to most games, and there’s too much balancing with all the classes and subclasses, PvP and PvE, and different expansions the player base use. It must be a nightmare for game design.
I think they should either release less often and stop marketing the game as an MMO or reduce polish and just add crazy shit to the game.
And crucible needs to be way better.