The reaction above from Destiny 2 content creator SneakyBeaver is typical of the wave of joy that met Bungie’s announcement yesterday that Destiny 2 is being taken out of end-of-life maintenance mode.
For those that missed it, slightly over three months ago the game was sent to live out its days on a farm upstate, where it would no longer receive any sort of content updates. Yesterday, that decision was dramatically reversed, with Bungie saying that Destiny is once again “foundational” to the studio’s future. To that end, as an initial gesture of good faith, work has begun on restoring all the cut content to the game (a lot of it paid) that had been removed as part of the Destiny Content Vault scheme.
Much of the reaction from the community has centred on the campaign waged by content creators and players to let Sony know they weren’t going to simply accept the end of Destiny without pushback. The form that took was pinging Sony’s social accounts, wherever they might be found, but especially in the chat during live showcases, and spamming We Want Destiny 3.
A change.org petition passed 400k signatories, player concurrency for Destiny 2 remained approximately six times that of Marathon, Bungie’s other game, and even Warframe fans showed up to lend moral support.
So, no surprise that Sony and Bungie’s surprise change of strategy has been greeted with a victory lap from those who campaigned against the cancellation. (I like to imagine guardians gathering in the tower to fire their Khvostovs joyously in the air.)
A few examples of those include lore master My name is Byf, whose reaction video is titled ‘We did NOT go quietly. We Won’. The reference is to a Dylan Thomas poem ‘Do Not Go Quietly Into That Good Night,’ but also a nod to a post made by Bungie principal comms manager dmg04, who posted the same quote around the time Destiny 2’s mothballing was announced, which many took as a sign to fight back.
Elsewhere, YouTuber Mactics went with DESTINY IS BACK… WE DID IT! for his video. One of the biggest channels that had maintained pressure on Sony was Aztecross, who simply went with ‘Destiny Community, You Did It.’ Cross has sources in Bungie, and had been hinting something was coming for a few weeks, but it’s fun watching him pretend to be surprised.
My favourite reaction came from Llama. In his video, ‘I’m so happy, we actually WON!’, you can watch him get the news in real time (whilst playing Destiny 2 on stream). He goes from gobsmacked to infectious laughter to almost tearing up. For those who love the game, and have made a living from covering it, it’s hard to understate how much its resurrection means. I say that as someone with many 1,000s of hours in-game, who has also felt adrift since its effective ending.
Not everyone’s response has been unalloyed enthusiasm. Over on r/DestinyTheGame there are several threads calling for caution. One is titled ‘Please keep expectations in check’, while another reads ‘I’m so happy to hear the news today, but I genuinely hope Bungie understands why we engaged with Monument of Triumph.’ Both sentiments make perfect sense. We have all been here before. Other content creators also expressed skepticism.
One of the best known Destiny 2 faces, Datto, wrote on X: “to anyone wondering: i am not unretiring from destiny. happy for y’all though! but i am gonna keep trying to do something new :)” Elsewhere, he said more bluntly “yeah I’m not planning a return for sunset content”. In a similar vein, Gladd, who left Destiny 2 long before it was sunset, sounded a note of caution:
“Here we go. Now everyone’s hopes are up. Most likely more unfulfilled promises. The “I-told-you-so” people are gonna spam “We Won!” And the folks with a single personality trait are gonna be let down… again. This seems like another repeated cycle.”
Whilst that might be overly cynical, it’s fair to note that we don’t know how Bungie plans to solve the core problem the game has always faced: how to create enough content to keep a rabid fanbase happy, without costs and file size ballooning. Particularly with almost half the studio laid off, and along with them an enormous amount of institutional knowledge having left the building.
For me, the fascinating question is how much did the fan campaign actually change the minds of Sony’s c-suite. For a game this big to get the bullet, only to then make a comeback a few months later, is almost unprecedented.
I’ve dealt with all the major console manufacturers in my time, and it’s remarkable how thin-skinned the senior execs tend to be. Though the cancellation might have made business sense, I don’t think Sony anticipated the scale of the player response, and clearly didn’t enjoy having their every online announcement met with a horde of pitchfork wielding guardians. Not when it already has the physical media holdouts to deal with.
What I do know is that this clearly wasn’t the original plan. You don’t cancel a game only to uncancel it three months later without something substantial changing. We’ll likely never know the exact calculus behind the decision, or how much the player campaign weighed in that versus more mundane financial stuff, but what’s clear is that the community did have an impact. And for a game about unkillable zombies, that feels just about perfect.