Shortly after announcing an additional 220 layoffs, Bungie stated that its plans for future Destiny content were unimpacted by the brutal round of job cuts, though a new report published by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier suggests otherwise.
Citing several anonymous current and former Bungie employees, Schreier has claimed that Bungie is changing its content plans for Destiny 2 going forward, with annual expansions set to be replaced by smaller updates. The same was stated earlier by journalist Jeff Grubb.
With sales of expansions declining year-over-year – with The Final Shape allegedly having sold less at launch than last year’s Lightfall – and development costs for developing them being as exorbitant as they are, the studio has reportedly decided to stop releasing annual expansions, and under new director Tyson Green, will now release smaller updates for the title.
The goal will reportedly be to both retain existing players and attract new ones, with smaller content updates similar to Into the Light, which was released earlier in the year, being seen as the ideal way forward. Rather than selling these new content updates, Bungie intends to release them for free to appeal to veteran players, while future story content could also rope in characters and locations not previously seen in the Destiny universe.
As for what the future holds for Destiny beyond that, that much is very much up in the air. Destiny 3 reportedly isn’t in development (and never was), while it’s claimed that Bungie also cancelled a third-person Destiny spinoff codenamed Payback to instead focus on the development of Marathon.
