My Characters Beat Me Up and Take My Lunch Money

I've been trying to put into words how the final update of Destiny makes me feel since it was announced. I haven't been able to appreciate it the way I used to since the second round of layoffs after TFS. Every story beat that didn't land or every mission that felt a bit tedious made me wonder - what could this have been if they had kept the whole team? What would have happened if they had been given the time and resources to make something great?

I love this universe, and the characters that hundreds of developers have poured their hearts into creating. But the American games industry feels hostile towards the kind of work that made the Destiny universe feel so special to me - lore entries don't make money, cutscenes are too expensive, every line of dialogue is another budget expense that yields no return on investment in the eyes of the stakeholders. I saw the same thing happening in the game I was working on, where budgets were reduced over and over again, forcing my team to work harder and harder to try and meet a level of quality that was simply unobtainable without sufficient time and money. We spent months scrambling to find solutions to budget cuts, only to be told the budget was being cut yet again, and again, and again. Finally we were told the game was going to be shut down - and the hundreds of people working on the team, including myself, would be laid off. There was no consideration for the success of our final update, or the thousands of people who loved our game and played every single day - years of investment both from developers and players was reduced to a number on a spreadsheet, and someone who makes more than all our salaries combined decided that the number wasn't big enough.

All this to say, the news of Destiny's final update hit very close to home for me, and brought up a lot of grief I've spent the last six months trying to process. I know firsthand how angry the devs must be, and how scared, and how bitter - what could they have done better? What could have prevented this? There may be design decisions you can point towards, misplaced focus on crossovers and cosmetics, but ultimately the decision to end Destiny came from the top, from a number on a spreadsheet that someone decided wasn't big enough, and wasn't interested in trying to fix.

The games industry is feeling increasingly hopeless, with shockingly few jobs being fought over by thousands of laid off devs. Something like 30% of the American games industry has been laid off within the past few years - many have been laid off, fought their way into a new job, uprooted their families and sold their homes to move to a new city, only to be laid off again a few months later. Within my circle, there's been a lot of speculation about what the end of Destiny means for Bungie, especially since Marathon isn't taking off in the way they had hoped. Bungie, for all its faults, will always be the reason I fell in love with games - an industry without Destiny, and potentially without Bungie, is nauseating to think about.

There's so much I have to thank Destiny for. It gave me something to look forward to during an exceptionally difficult time in my life. I got back into Destiny shortly before I started thinking about my gender, and transitioning is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. It caused me to lose my partner of many years, caused a rift between my family, and forced me to look in the mirror and really acknowledge how unhappy I was for the first time in my life. People have written before about how a lot of themes in Destiny strike a particular chord with the trans community, and I don't think it's surprising that exploring the lore and writing about my favorite characters became a safe space for me while the rest of my life seemed to be falling apart at my own hands. The game inspired a creativity in me that I had been suppressing for years, and the community here gave me a glimmer of confidence that there was something I was doing that people liked. Because of Destiny, I became a much better artist, I took on creative projects I never would have dreamed of, and I allowed myself to wonder for the first time what I wanted my life to look like rather than just mindlessly doing what I thought I was supposed to do. My whole life, I've made myself believe that any creative work is just a silly, self-indulgent hobby, something to keep secret from the people around me. This weekend, I'm going to be selling art for the first time in my life, and I don't think I ever would have made it to that point without the joy this community and this game have brought me.