Bungie Executives Wanted to Make Destiny Subscription-Based

Sometimes controversies are like dominoes – knock over one, and the rest begin to fall, one after another, until the subject is absolutely drowned in backlash. Game studio Bungie now finds itself in that exact situation, where following the latest art theft scandal – the fourth in the studio's history – more and more developers are stepping forward to expose the extent of the greed and toxicity within the company.

The latest report comes from Destin Legarie, who spoke with several former Bungie developers about their time at the studio, and their accounts paint a grim and unsettling picture of how the company is operated.

Unsurprisingly, much of that picture revolves around plain, banal greed. According to one former employee, Bungie's execs once considered introducing subscriptions to Destiny, an idea that was "vehemently" shut down by the staff. In another case, higher-ups were reportedly concerned that the glowing effect on Destiny 2's Trials of Osiris PvP armor looked too good, fearing it might hurt sales in Eververse, the in-game store.

Another ex-developer recalled a meeting where staff received a "monetization scolding," highlighting once again what many ex-employees see as Bungie's core problem – the Ebenezer Scrooge-level greed of its top decision-makers.

While greed might be the core problem, it's not the only one, with the studio's toxic culture – where leadership refuses to listen to developers and, worse yet, acts hostile about it – taking silver. As one former dev stated, executives would openly dismiss ideas and proposals from anyone ranked below them, saying that if they didn't come up with it themselves, it wasn't even worth discussing.

Another concern raised to Destin was Bungie's increasingly corporate, HR-driven company culture, where "games" turned into "products" and "players" into "customers." One particularly egregious example shared by a former dev involved employees receiving scolding emails from corporate for speaking publicly about internal issues, layoffs, or even for promoting their own personal work.

According to Destin’s sources, things only started to improve after the executives responsible for poisoning the environment left the Destiny team – only to move over to Marathon, which is hardly reassuring given that Bungie "absolutely cannot afford" for Marathon to fail.

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