How Destiny Went Hollywood to Survive the Negativity

So, you are a big gaming company with a big video game coming out. At least $300 million was spent on this game. At least.


You secretly realize that your game may not turn out as well as you planned.


Gaming journalists are highly anticipating getting their first look at the game before it releases to the public. So the question is, do you give it to them and absorb the upcoming mediocre reviews? Or do you limit the pre-release reviews, limit the press, and just allow for the opening weeks to attempt to win back the money coldly spent on the heavy marketing and the game itself? Well of course Bungie and friends chose the latter, launched a layer of journalism controversy when the reviews started arriving, and it overshadowed the great opening week. Also overshadowing the criticisms were the barrage of cool commercials flying left and right on all your cable networks.

Time will tell if the seemingly vengeful reviews will negate some of the sales in the long run but one thing is for certain: the 2 million it gained on opening week can overcome any obstacle leading up to it. Taking a page from the Hollywood Blockbuster, we are seeing an increase in companies releasing AAA titles with extreme hype and plenty of incentives on that opening week before anybody can realize how flawed it just might be. While smaller and indie games depend on the good reviews (more so than movies to be honest) to make its way to a successful run, the blockbuster strategy allows for companies like Activision to just have a good hype train to make back its money before the criticism can even arrive.

Call of Duty owns November every single year---no matter how bad the game may or may not be. American gamers love familiar shoot em’ up/online territory, and Call of Duty has become that go-to franchise. Selling 9 million at least per game since Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty claims the month of November, starts the hype from the summer, and allows for the dedicated fanbase to do the rest. Movies do best in the summer, while video games do best in the fall---especially in the months of September (Halo, Grand Theft Auto 5) and November.

Video game creation is tough, because making games that have the AAA look cost more than ever. They cost the amount of a summer film. So the goals in the past 5-7 years have shifted to instead of catering to the gaming journalists that can spread the good word around, they decided to invade the ad space of popular websites and invade the television sets. Long gone are the days when Mario Kart: Double Dash got a 7.9 from IGN and launched a wave of controversy. IGN and Gamespot don’t have the power of before, and we see magazines and websites like 1up and Gone Gold falling by the wayside.

The Hollywood trend has been in gaming for a while, but Destiny is arguably the first example of a game that not only managed to overcome the negative reviews, but managed to overcome the gamer outcry and gaming website’s seemingly disdain taste for the new franchise. And this might be the sign for things to come as now places like IGN don’t get the easy access to new games if the big companies don’t believe in it. Destiny survived the Twitter negativity, and few things can ever survive Twitter hate.

Although I don’t see Eastern Hemisphere gaming giants like Nintendo tread down this path (Nintendo doesn’t even really believe much in the power of having the right release date) Western Hemisphere companies like Activision, EA, and Ubisoft follow suit with focusing its budget more on marketing and less on the game itself. It might come off as cruel and misleading to the gaming public but consider this: the gaming industry doesn’t allow for you to flop and survive. Flops can cripple the biggest of gaming companies no matter what the track record is. Midway Games did amazing in the 90s with NBA Jam, NFL Blitz, and Mortal Kombat. Now it’s in the middle of Chapter 11. The gaming industry is cruel, and every possible edge will be used to ensure that the companies of today don’t fall like the companies that struggled to get out of the 90s and 2000s.

Although video games make more money than movies nowadays, expect gaming companies to look as summer blockbusters when figuring out a way to churn out guaranteed hits. It has worked for Call of Duty (a franchise that never releases a game with more than 2 hours of single-player gameplay) and Destiny (A seemingly incomplete and bugged-out game)---so expect the strategy to expand.