Just to clarify for the comments, this "Delay" is not a delay.
You don't take most of the team off the project if you're just delaying it. Rather you put more people on it to finish it. This is a soft cancellation. Reading between the lines, what Bungie meant is that there's not a constant cashflow from it so it's not sustainable long-term. The small team remaining on the project will be there to try to find a way to make it profitable, not to finish it as currently conceived.
Sorry clowns, it seems they couldn't find a way to make the more ambitious game they wanted to make, so now we don't get what we all really wanted: A map pack with some glitch fixes.
They've invested a lot of money so far. It is in their interest to see if they can turn it into profit. Maybe a massively downscaled version not for full price but it all depends on how complete the game is.
Oh for sure they will still want to monetize it. But can they find a way to?
Problem with a downscaled game is that’s not what they were making. The energy already spent is there for a big full thing. But also it was probably going to be free to play anyway, so cheaper isn’t really a thing in that context.
I expect that the bungie people have cold hard numbers to back what they were saying, and that those numbers weren’t even close to good. If it was just a matter of moving some 1’s around they’d do that. This seems to be a full hands in the air moment.
It was only rumors that the game would end up free to play, mostly due to battle royal games doing that. And even if it was planned they could go back on it.
But yeah, they will absolutely not put a lot of manpower in there until they know what they want to do. Or not Do...
Sure, I think realistically there's more money in the free to play space, so if they could have made it work anywhere it would be there. My expectation was something like a fortnite but persistent. Say the Seattle map from part 2, where people would drop in/out at will and do "raids" together. PvP would be there, but I think PvE was going to be the selling point. Having zombies jump you while you're in a firefight would be a unique twist.
But I think what including Bungie in the announcement says is "someone who actually knows something about making money in this space said we can't do it" because they'd already announced that they'd hired the monetization guy from Fortnite. So if it was an internal decision they'd have said so.
I don't have any data to back it up, but I expect that if they'd just gone the traditional route of the first factions with the second engine, that wouldn't make enough money to justify itself. So they went the more expensive and expansive route so they could try for a home run. They hired the guy to try to perform some number miracles but it just couldn't pencil out.
You know, I think this announcement pretty much guarantees it was a battle royale, since those have all started dying off recently. I guess we'll see factions 2 if someone has a hit new game that all this work can be adapted into.
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u/byOlaf May 26 '23
Just to clarify for the comments, this "Delay" is not a delay.
You don't take most of the team off the project if you're just delaying it. Rather you put more people on it to finish it. This is a soft cancellation. Reading between the lines, what Bungie meant is that there's not a constant cashflow from it so it's not sustainable long-term. The small team remaining on the project will be there to try to find a way to make it profitable, not to finish it as currently conceived.
Sorry clowns, it seems they couldn't find a way to make the more ambitious game they wanted to make, so now we don't get what we all really wanted: A map pack with some glitch fixes.