Activision finally explains why it parted ways with Bungie on Destiny

A month after the amicable divorce between publisher Activision and developer Bungie, in which the Halo developer gained total control over the rights to its burgeoning Destiny franchise, the former has finally offered its side of the story to the split. 

In its annual financial conference call, Activision explained its reasoning for consciously uncoupling with Bungie, despite previously signing up to a 10 year contract for the Destiny franchise. According to Chief Operative Officer Coddy Johnson, Destiny 2 "was not meeting [Activision's] financial expectations" and the franchise "would not have been a material contributor to operating income to our business" as a result. 

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Johnson also admitted that Activision "had internal resources supplementing Bungie’s work, and that means that [the studio was] tying up one of our scarcest resources, which is development time, which now will be freed up after a short transition period.”

Despite the reasoning, Johnson emphasised that the split was a mutual, amicable one, which now means that Bungie "gets to focus on the IP that they created, and we get to focus on our biggest opportunities and on our biggest franchises with our best resources.”

Speaking of biggest franchises, in the same earnings call Activision also had more to say about this year's upcoming Call of Duty game, which will bring back a singleplayer campaign mode and very much sounds like it's going to be the much anticipated sequel to Modern Warfare 3. 

Destiny 2 is one of the best FPS games to play right now. See what others you might be missing out on. 

Alex Avard

I'm GamesRadar's Features Writer, which makes me responsible for gracing the internet with as many of my words as possible, including reviews, previews, interviews, and more. Lucky internet!