We finally got to hear an official explanation from Activision Blizzard regarding Bungie (and their IP, Destiny) leaving them behind.

Coddy Johnson, Activision‘s chief operating officer, has answered a question about the subject at the end of their conference call: „First, as you know, we didn’t own the underlying Destiny IP, and we do for all our other major franchises, which we think is not just a differentiator for us in the industry, but also controlling the underlying IP gives us the chance to move into new experiences and new engagement models, which also come with new revenue streams and of course structurally higher economics, when you own the IP. And that leads to probably the second factor in our decision process, which is, Destiny is highly critically acclaimed, high-quality content, but it was not meeting our financial expectations. Under the arrangement we’ve reached, [resources] will be freed up after a short transition period.”

In short, money, or the lack thereof, was the reason why Bungie departed from the publisher. We do want to go back to the final sentence: the resources mean Vicarious Visions and High Moon Studios – they work on Destiny 2 content, but not for long, going by Johnson’s comment.

Source: PCGamer