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Just looking on Bungie LinkedIn, they employ 800 employees. Industry standard burn rate per month is 10k. So around 96m a year minimum. They will have tonnes of

by timavr 9y ago

Just looking on Bungie LinkedIn, they employ 800 employees. Industry standard burn rate per month is 10k. So around 96m a year minimum. They will have tonnes of outsourcing expenses, testing etc etc. So Destiny 2 on 3 year cycle at minimum 300m on dev costs alone, most likely higher.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
The worst part is it's a beautiful but poorly-made game. Even their biggest fans hate what they've done. https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7raulk/bungie_has_absolutely_bungled_its_communication/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7raulk/bungie_has_ab... https://www.pcgamesn.com/destiny-2/destiny-2-reboot-jason-schreier https://www.pcgamesn.com/destiny-2/destiny-2-reboot-jason-sc... What good is employing 800 people and spending 100 million a year to develop a bad final product? If you want to know where the tech industry can be attacked, it's in that massive inefficiency.
- always_good 9y ago
  >If you want to know where the tech industry can be attacked, it's in that massive inefficiency. How is this different from any large, ambitious project? It's also essentially an art project where you have to make content people enjoy, so engineering resources won't save the day like they can in tech. And you can end up in a place where your lead visionary ended up in a place where they just couldn't deliver on it or it just wasn't the necessary vision, so you have to replace them. Seems weird to ascribe all this to "tech". Turns out, things are hard. To me, Destiny 2's failure has more in parallel with the fact that most people never finish developing a game nor writing a book.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    It's probably not much different, but tech is a force multiplier, and we are discussing the tech industry. There are many companies that are oversized. It doesn't take 800 people to make a mediocre game. You can make a great one with 8, but many big orgs aren't structured in a way to take advantage of that. If your goal is to put out the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster every few years, then that model "works" (or it works for the publisher), but if you want to make a great game, there must be better ways of doing it. You don't reboot a project of that size a little over a year before release without major management issues (this is not even counting the issues that saw Joe Staten and a lot of the old Bungie team leave in the middle of Destiny 1). By all accounts, Destiny 2 is a step backwards from the original. If you've got a working engine and a lot of artists and virtually unlimited resources (as Bungie did), all you've got to do is not fuck things up. But they did. There's an inefficiency there that's preventing good games from being made, and it's not just because things are hard, because they did most of the hard stuff 4 years ago.
    - badpun 9y ago
      > It doesn't take 800 people to make a mediocre game. You can make a great one with 8, but many big orgs aren't structured in a way to take advantage of that. There is no sure path to making a great game (or a great anything), so corporate entities cannot depend on it - investors demand predictability. What they CAN depend on though is throwing hundreds of people into making a game of unknown quality (probably mediocre) but with amazing assets, and possibly with an outside IP (a Batman game etc.). So far, this strategy seems to be a valid one.
      - fhood 9y ago
        I don't know, some studios seem to have found a formula for consistently producing above average games. Look at From, Bethesda (the developers not the publishers) or Valve. I think it may have a lot to do with giving a medium sized team a long time, rather than a long one a short time.
        sleepybrett 9y ago
        Bethesda games are uniformly buggy piles of crap that are only fixed after 100s of hours of modded in fixes. Bethesda is only saved as an entity because they embrace modding. Valve is a very bad example, yes they consistently make above average games, however they don't make many and as a dev studio i'm sure valve is deep in the red, they don't make money on their games, they make money on steam.

by timavr 9y ago

aaron-lebo 9y ago

The worst part is it's a beautiful but poorly-made game. Even their biggest fans hate what they've done. https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7raulk/bungie_has_absolutely_bungled_its_communication/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7raulk/bungie_has_ab... https://www.pcgamesn.com/destiny-2/destiny-2-reboot-jason-schreier https://www.pcgamesn.com/destiny-2/destiny-2-reboot-jason-sc... What good is employing 800 people and spending 100 million a year to develop a bad final product? If you want to know where the tech industry can be attacked, it's in that massive inefficiency.

always_good 9y ago
>If you want to know where the tech industry can be attacked, it's in that massive inefficiency. How is this different from any large, ambitious project? It's also essentially an art project where you have to make content people enjoy, so engineering resources won't save the day like they can in tech. And you can end up in a place where your lead visionary ended up in a place where they just couldn't deliver on it or it just wasn't the necessary vision, so you have to replace them. Seems weird to ascribe all this to "tech". Turns out, things are hard. To me, Destiny 2's failure has more in parallel with the fact that most people never finish developing a game nor writing a book.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  It's probably not much different, but tech is a force multiplier, and we are discussing the tech industry. There are many companies that are oversized. It doesn't take 800 people to make a mediocre game. You can make a great one with 8, but many big orgs aren't structured in a way to take advantage of that. If your goal is to put out the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster every few years, then that model "works" (or it works for the publisher), but if you want to make a great game, there must be better ways of doing it. You don't reboot a project of that size a little over a year before release without major management issues (this is not even counting the issues that saw Joe Staten and a lot of the old Bungie team leave in the middle of Destiny 1). By all accounts, Destiny 2 is a step backwards from the original. If you've got a working engine and a lot of artists and virtually unlimited resources (as Bungie did), all you've got to do is not fuck things up. But they did. There's an inefficiency there that's preventing good games from being made, and it's not just because things are hard, because they did most of the hard stuff 4 years ago.
  - badpun 9y ago
    > It doesn't take 800 people to make a mediocre game. You can make a great one with 8, but many big orgs aren't structured in a way to take advantage of that. There is no sure path to making a great game (or a great anything), so corporate entities cannot depend on it - investors demand predictability. What they CAN depend on though is throwing hundreds of people into making a game of unknown quality (probably mediocre) but with amazing assets, and possibly with an outside IP (a Batman game etc.). So far, this strategy seems to be a valid one.
    - fhood 9y ago
      I don't know, some studios seem to have found a formula for consistently producing above average games. Look at From, Bethesda (the developers not the publishers) or Valve. I think it may have a lot to do with giving a medium sized team a long time, rather than a long one a short time.
      - sleepybrett 9y ago
        Bethesda games are uniformly buggy piles of crap that are only fixed after 100s of hours of modded in fixes. Bethesda is only saved as an entity because they embrace modding. Valve is a very bad example, yes they consistently make above average games, however they don't make many and as a dev studio i'm sure valve is deep in the red, they don't make money on their games, they make money on steam.