During last week's Activision-Blizzard investors' call, company COO Collister Johnson spoke of several games and recent content launches before calling out Destiny 2 by name saying, "Some of our other franchises, like Destiny, are not performing as well as we'd like, and we're working to accelerate the pace of live operations innovation and improve the speed with which we we release new content to keep our players engaged and to provide new opportunities for monetization."
Johnson seemed to backtrack a bit when asked for clarification of his statements, particularly since the player population had grown after the Forsaken launch. Johnson said, "I guess I'd start by reiterating that Forsaken is a high-quality expansion of content into the universe. Honestly, it's the highest-quality content we've seen in the franchise to date."
In particular, Johnson seems concerned that not enough players are staying engaged in the game, though the overall quality of Forsaken was excellent if not enough to bring back the core audience.
And once you're in it, with the ongoing features and services and content, there's really deep engagement that takes place. And part of it was also because we have not yet seen the full core reengage in Destiny, which has led to the underperformance against our expectations to date. Some players we think are still in wait-and-see mode. So when you're in, you're deeply engaged. If you're not, we're hoping now is the time to work and to bring players back in and to win them back.
It seems that Destiny 2 Game Director Luke Smith took umbrage with Johnson's comments. He took to Twitter on November 10th to say, "We are not disappointed with Forsaken. We set out to build a game that Destiny players would love, and at Bungie, we love it too. Building Destiny for players who love it is and will remain our focus going forward."
Via PCGamesInsider
