Phil Spencer: Xbox Passed on Signing Destiny 1 - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 September 2024 / 12,183 Views
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer in a talk at PAX West 2024 revealed Bungie pitched the first Destiny to Xbox and they ended up passing on the game.
"Getting the pitch for Destiny [and] do we want to sign this - we ended up not signing Destiny," said Spencer. "[Bungie] obviously went with Activision.
"To see what it grew into, like from a business kind of Xbox standpoint, I can look at it and it's just been a really interesting journey in terms of what they built."
Bungie was founded in 1991 and was acquired by Microsoft in 2000. In 2007, the developer would become an independent company and sign a 10-year deal with Activision in 2010. The first Destiny released in September 2014 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Xbox history seems to be one bad decision after another. They let Genshin Impact go too and Sony grabbed it. It's like they don't have the slightest clue about this business
I doubt that Destiny would be the massive franchise that it is if it were just an Xbox exclusive.
Still a big enough franchise that would've pulled gamers into the XB camp over the last decade. That can't happen if Bungie leaves.
Also, what about Halo? You're not just losing out on Destiny, you've caused yourselves major headaches when it comes to your go to AAA franchise and have destabilized it's future.
"To see what it grew into, like from a business kind of Xbox standpoint, I can look at it and it's just been a really interesting journey in terms of what they built."
I guess this demanded some serious willpower to formulate it like this.
I mean, yeah, they owned them at the time and probably wanted Bungie to continue making Halo, which is why they broke off?
Yes, Bungie left because they wanted to make Destiny. I believe they were ok with continuing to make Halo as well, as long as MS would give them the resources to do so, which MS declined.
Not only did MS lose out on Destiny, they screwed up Halo royally, their big AAA exclusive.
Phil Spencer admitting to yet another L. Please Microsoft, you need better leadership. How long are you gonna keep letting Nintendo/Sony beat you?
At the time, it was completely understandable. Destiny 1 was so much of an unplayable mess that Bungie rebooted the story just a year before release, which is when Phil would’ve seen how the game was turning out, and when it did release, everyone seems to forget the game was the biggest 6/10 release ever lol. The first DLC, The Dark Below, was god awful, and it wasn’t until the House of Wolves DLC 8 months after launch that the game actually started to take shape. I was there for it all following every aspect of the games development. Those of us in the hardcore Bungie camp thought the game was going to be the end of Bungie initially lol
Destiny 1 was decent at launch. It had flaws, but wasn't looked at too negatively until the first DLC dropped because it was terrible.
I was always under the impression that the Destiny rewrite had to do with Activision being unhappy with much of the game and wanted something considerably different. Plus the types of changes you'd think you'd see after Bungie left Activision, did happen, which certainly makes it seem like Activision was forcing Bungie to do things their way and not the way Bungie wanted, from the start.
Now whether or not things would've been any different at MS, who knows, but they did seem to let Bungie do their thing for the most part with Halo, besides giving them enough time maybe.
No it was Bungie execs that were unhappy with how the game was turning out both from a gameplay and story perspective that ended up costing Joseph Staten his job. The story was much more fleshed out, but was more akin to Halo, so Bungie shifted gears, fired several notable veterans, and redid everything about the game too close to release to where everything about it felt incredibly half baked. Except the Vault of Glass raid. That was awesome!
Or were Activision execs unhappy with Bungie execs for what they were producing at that point in time?
Why didn't Bungie want to stay with Activision? Wasn't it supposed to be a 10 year deal? Bungie seemed pretty upbeat when they separated.
Destiny got better for quite a while after that and things were looking good, but then eventually went to shit again.
Destiny 1 clearly wasn't ready for release, which was because of the major last minute changes. VoG was dope though.
No, it was Bungie execs. It's all been pretty well documented at this point even shortly after Destiny initially launched. But Bungie didn't want to stay with Activision because they started taking the reigns of the amount of content they wanted for the franchise. Like how all Activision studios now work on CoD, that's what they were starting to do with Destiny, and so Activision started providing their own studios to make more content for Destiny. It wasn't Bungie's idea to start making a Destiny 2, but that's what Activision wanted.
Splitting from Activision meant Bungie could make Destiny the way they wanted to make it, but I'm guessing Bungie heads got used to making so much money that they didn't stray from Activision's way of running business after that lol.
Bungie's leadership had been poor for years and then they hooked with Activision, it got even worse.
Agreed that VoG was super dope though and was a big saving grace of year 1!
Why you say this to take even more Ls, is not like you havent taken any recently, my god
i see alot of people here can run microsofts xbox division better than its being run now
