One last goodbye, Destiny

 December 2023 is when I gave up on Destiny 2, a decision I haven't regretted.  Did it help usher in the change I was hoping for?  Not really, no... Sony didn't take the nuclear option and flush the Bungie board (doubtless thinking of the lawsuits that would be sure to follow), but rather allowed the then-head of the board to cash out, without replacing him.  In the meantime, Sony basically absorbed everything from Bungie except their Destiny and Marathon teams, then watched as Destiny staggered about without sufficient support or focus, pinning their hopes on Marathon instead.  As of this writing, that looks to be a poor decision, with Sony having to write down some of the value of their Bungie acquisition after Marathon finally launched to a tepid market response.

At any rate, the game looks to be up for Destiny.  The current game has been announced to be getting its last update next month, after which it will be in maintenance mode, just like the last game.  It's always possible that Bungie could be thinking in terms of prepping a Destiny 3, but current leaks make that look unlikely at best.  Rather, there's likely to be layoffs after that last patch comes out, with maybe some lucky survivors getting yeeted over to the Marathon team.

I feel for the Destiny team members, truly.  There's never a good time to be laid off, but these days are amazingly bad.  Still, Marathon doesn't strike me as my sort of fare, and, even if it were, there's still at least one lingering board member there from before Sony's takeover, so I'm still not getting involved in anything Bungie for the time being.  At this point, it's almost with clinical detachment that I'm keeping an eye on Bungie's future.  Will they somehow parlay Marathon into something that will reverse the company's fortunes, or will Sony eventually absorb the remnants, and squirrel away its IP?  I know which path I'm seeing as likely.

Tidbits from gaming land

 Yeah, I'm going to give the real world's continuing slide from SNAFU to TARFU a rest this time.  Let's stick with smaller-stakes stupidity from the world of games.

First up has to be Valve's launch of the new version of the Steam Controller.  I get why they might have thought the demand wasn't going to be as high as it was, because they tried this game once before, in 2015.  I got one back then (and still use it to this day), even though it was apparent that it was a compromised device in some respects - notably, lacking a physical d-pad or right analog stick, and expecting the clickable track-pads to be a suitable replacement.  At least they learned from that when they made the Steam Deck, which helped it become as dominant as it is in its gaming niche.

So now, May 4th, in a world seeded by the prominence of Steam Deck, they launch orders for their new Steam Controller, this time without those pesky compromises, and they decide to do so as a worldwide launch at 10am Pacific.  I tried to get my hands on one, but, to nobody's surprise, the scalpers and their bots won the day, overwhelming Steam's payment processing systems, with eBay listings for two or three times the price cropping up shortly thereafter.

Normally, that's where the story would end, but Steam is a different sort of company in many respects.  They took much of the week thereafter to look at what happened, and think about countermeasures.  So now, as of May 8th, they decided to implement a reservation queue, similar to what they did when they launched Steam Deck, limited to accounts "in good standing" to effectively shut down scalper shenanigans.  My reservation is in, so now we wait.

Of course, I could start up another game now, and the temptation is there, especially when I see things like publisher sales on quirky "AA" games.  But lately, there's been a disturbing up-tick in games getting launched even as (or after!) the studios that worked on them are shut down, effectively eliminating any chance that their worst bugs will ever get fixed.  So, shout out to Bellular for this video about Nacon, detailing some of their business moves and their relation to the state of the games they've been releasing of late.  Long story short, they've just jumped up to the same level as Ubisoft for "do not buy"-ness for me, if only for engineering the shutdown of a subsidiary union studio while they staff up an internal non-union studio for the same game genre the old studio served.

Well, things should improve in this space with time, maybe after the AI bubble pops and further constrains the credit markets.  For now, I'm getting by fine on Warframe, and Forza Horizon 6 is on the horizon, courtesy of a more-palatable Game Pass subscription price.  Let's see what comes next!