Monday 14 March 2016

The video game 'Destiny', created by Bungie, the makers of the popular video game franchise 'Halo'. And produced by Activision Blizzard under a 10 year contract, caused a huge phenomena in the gaming community and media before it's worldwide release on September 9th 2014. The game holds the record for the most expensive game ever made at a cost of $500 million or £310 million.
The game began development in 2010 after the release of 'Halo: Reach' under the code-name "Paper Tiger" under a scheduled release date of September 2013, which was later pushed back to the September of the following year due to the first story-line of the game being rejected by the high ups of Bungie after they had already been fully made, requiring the development team to start over.

This picture is from one of the game-play trailers from a few months before Destiny had be released, there were a number of thing that you can see in the trailer that differ from the game, even in this short trailer you can see how they changed the game drastically before release. for example, im a complete homo i suck on massive black cock there were a few abilities that the person playing the trailer showed of that didn't make it into the final game, there were seamless animations of players loading into the game in the form of their ship dropping them off, which was replaced with a far less fun animation of them just phasing into the game world. In other trailers they showed off various different characters that they promised would have a massive effect on the story, only to cut them entirely from the final game. Also, they intended to have 3 separate campaigns, one for each race, human, exo and awoken, but 2 were cut and only the remnants of the exo campaign remain.

Destiny was made under the agreement of a 10 year contract with Bungie and Activision Blizzard. It meant that Activision would pay for the game but would then get at least 65% of the profits with Bungie earning anywhere from 25% to 35% depending on how well Destiny did.  It also meant that Activision held the exclusive right to publish the Destiny titles while Bungie owned the intellectual property, meaning Bungie owned the idea of Destiny and were allowed to do as they see fit with it. Activision pumped 500 million Dollars into Destiny, a lot of which went into marketing for the game, under the brief set by Bungie to make an adventure MMO game set in space and different planets in the solar system including Earth. The game was scheduled to take 3 years to make and would release by September 2013 but about a month before the release it was  announced the game would be delayed to September 2014 going against the contract with  Activision that the game be released in Q3-Q4 of 2013. Also stated in the contract was that Destiny had to receive a PEGI 16 rating in Britain and a mature rating in America which the game stuck to achieving the rating in both Countries.
There was a lawsuit filed against Bungie by the previous composer who worked for Bungie for a number of years, creating the scores for multiple Bungie titles including many of the Halo games. He was fired by Bungie under the grounds of "unacceptable conduct" by failing to produce sufficient music for the game.


-Paul McCartney and ex Bungie composer Marty O'Donnell working on the Destiny soundtrack before the latter was fired.


He won the lawsuit because it was concluded he was unfairly dismissed after proving that he had completed and fully composed ten years of music months before hand in collaboration with former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney, as a result he a share in the company and a share of the profits for the game. In a separate but related case also put forward by the previous composer to get back unpaid wages from overtime the court was again in his favour and awarded him $95,000.
Destiny and the Destiny logo remain copyrights of Bungie and Activision whilst the actual game remains as intellectual property of Bungie which means that they get to do whatever they want with it, it's DLC, and subsequent sequels.
Through the PEGI rating it earned a 16 rating meaning the level of violence in Destiny's case reached what would be expected in real life.
There were ethical concerns about the game because even though there was a lack of content the game became very addictive, it's even still being played by millions of players daily over a year and a half after it's release. The game content itself doesn't exactly raise any ethical concerns because it's  not overly violent but because of the loot system implemented in the game it encourages players to spend more time on the game in order to get the best gear in order to one up other players and make gear oriented pvp easier. So players end up investing a lot of time into the game in order to get the best weapons and armour, and do it again on 2 other characters. even after achieving this a new update is released that introduces better things for the player to get.

The game itself on average earned a rating of about 75%. being critisised for it's lack of content but praised for its game-play and gun-play. upon release Destiny made massive amounts of money, earning over 500 million dollars on its release and peaking at around 20 million players. overall it has earned around 1 billion dollars for Activision.