Destiny 2 players continue to find ways to express their anguish and anger about the pending end of development for the game, which will cease after next week’s sizable, exciting June 9 update. Now, they’re trying to blast Sony with a megaphone, and it worked, at least to some extent.
A petition has crossed 340,000 signatures asking Bungie to make Destiny 3 if Destiny 2 is shutting down. In the wake of the June 9 patch reveal, the game’s playercount peaks have nearly tripled, and fans are attempting a huge-scale login event on the 9th itself. But yesterday, fans figured out another way to get Sony’s attention. Perhaps annoyingly, but effectively.
The idea was to spam the mainstream and its offshoots with requests for Destiny 3, be it a written request, hashtag or frequently, a series of emotes made just for this occasion. And it worked. The vast majority of State of Play saw these Destiny 3 requests blasting the comments, and while bans were doled out, it was frequently overwhelming. This happened during the features of blockbusters like Wolverine and God of War Laufey as well.
The question, of course, is “will it do any good?” It’s a few steps past even a Hail Mary, and while my Bungie sources say no, it probably won’t, there are varying degrees to this.
The biggest asks are things like Sony reversing course on ending development on Destiny 2, and continuing on rather than following through with their decision. The biggest of all is trying to get Sony to greenlight a third Destiny game, which could cost hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars and years of development in a market where such a thing is considered a huge risk (even if Destiny fans would dispute that).
It is possible to wonder about other forms of “wins,” however. My hope is that Sony and Bungie may see the mass pushback and agree that perhaps development should not be cut down to absolute zero, with some small team left on the game to make something for it.
Past that, however, there are various pitches going on at Bungie for new games, and some of those are Destiny projects that are not as large in scale as a full-on Destiny sequel. I cannot confirm what any of these are, but past iterations of potential Destiny games were a shuttered adventure game, Payback, the idea of a PvP spinoff game in the vein of Trials, and one that actually came out, the NetEase Destiny Rising mobile game. The idea here is that fans could make enough noise to reinforce that the IP still has value and should not be put on ice forever, so maybe some sort of Destiny project could be greenlit for production.
It all seems unlikely. Petitions, chat spam and a big June 9 login day. I think it’s very cool to participate in and show support for the franchise and displeasure with its cancellation, but it will take a lot of factors for this to go anywhere meaningful, and Bungie is currently very tied up with Marathon. We’ll see what happens on June 9.
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