My first game console was Pong, which was THE first game console. Pong was created a few years before I was born, but by the time I could twiddle a knob it was the only thing in the household to jack into a TV. From there, we had an Atari, ColecoVision, my dad’s Apple IIe, and then the NES.

It felt like the videogame industry was five guys with pocket protectors rummaging in a Radioshack to see what they could do with pixels until the day the NES launched. It was a phenomenon. You couldn’t find one when they first launched. It felt like something from the future, complete with a laser gun and a weird robot accessory. From there, we got Playstation, XBox, and an entertainment sector that is now bigger than all of cinema and book publishing combined.

In 2010 or 2011, I got an email from one of the biggest names in this industry: Bungie. Their first hit was a shooter called Marathon, which was one of the few games playable on an Apple back when PCs dominated gaming. Their next big IP was Halo, one of the most successful games of all time. XBox would not have been the same without it. Halo would go on to sell millions of spin-off books and lead to a film adaptation. I can’t speak to the quality of either, but gaming became mainstream right around this time.

Bungie emailed me as WOOL hit the bestseller lists. Someone at the studio had read the books and become a fan. I took the meeting, a bit confused. Turns out they were recruiting sci-fi writers to help build out a new game they were cooking up. It hadn’t been announced anywhere yet, so I had to sign an NDA to do calls with them. They showed me the very beginnings of a game called Destiny.

I was very tempted to join on the development team. I’d been a hardcore gamer my entire life, and I was a fan of their work. One of my big dreams was to help develop a videogame from scratch, and here was an offer from an industry titan. Unfortunately, my publishing career was consuming sixty to eighty hours a week at the time, so I sadly declined.

Destiny ended up being a bit hit for Bungie, and Destiny 2 was even bigger. The franchise is over a decade old, with one of the major plot lines climaxing a year ago, concluding a saga as ambitious in scope and time as the first ten years of Marvel films. During this time, Destiny made Bungie a lot of money. So much so that Sony purchased the developer for an astounding $3.6 billion dollars.

3.6 Billion.

It raised eyebrows at the time, but with Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard at $68.7 billion, and several other consolidations at the time, it felt like you needed to gobble a studio or risk losing content to your competitors. Folks were overpaying, but this was Bungie. They created nothing but hits. Marathon, Halo, Destiny. Each one defined an entire generation of gaming. What has happened since has been an absolute catastrophe.

Instead of developing a new idea, Bungie decided to recycle their first ever IP: Marathon. Weird choice, since only olds like me had ever heard of it. Even weirder (and this is speculation, but I’m convinced it’s true), when Bungie went back and looked at the god-awful graphics of the time, they decided to turn flaw into feature. Here’s the original Marathon:

Bungie went back, played the original to figure out the lore and feel of the game, and they decided: Marathon wasn’t blocky and pixelated because that’s the best we could do with 8 bit graphics and 16k of memory! No! The game was pixelated ON PURPOSE! Let’s harken back to days of lore that almost no one gaming today ever played or thinks twice about and develop a AAA game with the same blocky pixelated look! It’ll be cute! It’ll be meta!

And that’s how we got a game that cost Bungie $250,000,000 and looks like this:

250 MILLION DOLLARS.

Okay, but gaming is very big and popular, and this is the studio that created Halo and Destiny. A studio that Sony bought for $3.6 billion. Surely they are going to create a game with a big story that draws in millions of gamers and spans across a broad universe with lore and depth they can milk for over a decade. Right?

Nope. Instead of creating a game that people can lose themselves in, they chased a genre where players lose their minds (trust me, we are going to learn some book publishing lessons from all this). Even though Destiny had a strong multiplayer component, creating squads with friends to go on adventures together, or loading up in small maps to battle other players in their PVP modes, the allure of the game was the sweeping saga. Film and TV stars (the late, great Lance Reddick, Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Nolan North) gave life to characters who lived (and occasionally, tragically, shockingly died). You traipsed across the galaxy with this cast. You fought for the same cause. You collected so many guns that vault maintenance became an issue.

As Destiny 2 was winding down its biggest plot line, a new kind of game was gaining an audience. Destiny is what’s called a “Looter Shooter.” You shoot guns and then hopefully pick up a better gun. Reload and repeat. This new kind of game was called an “Extraction Shooter.” The allure here is that you load into a world, try to grab some better gear, and then get out before another player kills you. When you die, you lose everything. But if you kill another player, you get all their loot. Winner-take-all.

First popularized with a game called Escape from Tarkov, game publishers were chasing the latest craze just like authors and book publishers tend to. So Bungie pivoted, chasing a trend, going away from what they did best, and they created a game for a hardcore audience instead of a new game similar to Halo or Destiny. When the free beta launched, the overall reaction was: wtf? Terrible UI, almost unreadable text (and a ton of it), an art style that was not only weird but it would turn out that some of it was stolen. It flopped big-time, especially as it landed alongside a surprising new extraction shooter called Arc Raiders.

The beta was so bad that Bungie delayed release and poured energy into making Marathon better. Imagine the pressure: your company is purchased for $3.6 billion dollars, which is roughly $4 million per developer, easily eight times the cost of a normal acquisition. The expectation is that you are going to help your new owner recoup some of those costs. And then your new game gets absolutely ripped by media and gamers alike when it lands.

When it finally released, the reception wasn’t much better. Hardcore fans love the game, some saying it’s the best thing they’ve played in years. These are a very vocal minority, as the game is currently getting fewer active players than Destiny 2, which has been largely abandoned for the past six months (hilariously, Destiny 1 recently saw a surge in active gamers as Destiny 2 fans went off to look for something else to play). Marathon’s player base has declined over 80% since its release less than two months ago. This is catastrophic for Sony and Bungie. Their cash cow, Destiny, was left fallow while hundreds of millions of dollars and years of development were poured into a niche genre that most players can’t stand and an IP that hardly anyone remembered.

Oh, and let’s make it pixelated and hope everyone gets the joke.

Writing Lessons

One of the hardest things to do as an author is know when to write a sequel and when to start something new. The biggest mistake you can make as a new author is to get sequelitis. You fall in love with the first world you create, the first characters who lived in your head, and you can’t leave them. It’s too easy. Too familiar. Now you’re six books in and getting better at your craft, and the only thing you can promote is the first thing you ever wrote. At some point, you have to put a bow on it and start something new. And then do that again. And again. When I wrote WOOL, my small but loyal readership was asking for a fifth book in my Molly Fyde series. When I wrote SAND, people were asking for more WOOL. Readers think they know what they want, when in reality they will usually love the thing you are most passionate about. Be careful reusing and recycling old material. Tap into the creativity that got you here.

Don’t case trends, create new ones. Bungie helped invent entire genres of video game that others copy today. To turn around and copy the latest craze is worse than dumb; it’s humiliating. Beneath them. Rather than listening to what fans want, tap in to gauge expectations only to subvert them. In a litle bit, I’ll give a roadmap of what Bungie should have done to create the next hit.

Story and immersion are everything. The original Marathon was eerie and spooky, a mystery unraveling as you shot your way through hoards of enemies. It was cerebral back when shooters were brazenly dumb. Halo had the same level of story and polish as many sci-fi films. Destiny was as ambitious as Marvel Studios. And all of these were accessible to new players. Just as our books need to lure in people who might not even read our genres, or have slacked off reading at all. The biggest compliments I get are from people who say they fell in love with reading again, or don’t usually read sci-fi, or have lost sleep or missed bus stops. IMMERSION is everything. Bungie forgot this.

Another mistake you can make is to listen solely to your biggest, most hardcore fans. The loudest people rarely speak for the majority. A superfan will beg for a spin-off based on their favorite character, and you’ll think everyone wants this. Trust yourself. You create the taste, not them. Do the things that created these superfans to begin with, but don’t cater to them or adjust your style for them.

Where Bungie went wrong is similar to what hurt the TV show LOST and the DC films: the interaction between audience and storyteller. For LOST, it was the rise of online forums where viewers congregated to share theories and impressions. The creators of LOST admit that they followed along and tried to outsmart their fans, and that this ended up being a mistake. For Bungie, the mistake was watching YouTubers who had mastered their game and trying to stay one step ahead of them. Any exploit was locked down quickly, while pesky bugs remained unfixed. Difficulty was scaled to the people who could play like it was a full-time job. Enjoyment seemed so antithetical to their goals that the “Destiny Fun Police” became a common phrase.

In Marathon, Bungie created a hardcore game for the hardestcore gamers, which wouldn’t be a problem had they not spent a quarter billion dollars to do so. It’s not possible to ever recoup that money with the gaming experience they created. There’s no story here, not one you can truly access. A tiny fraction of Marathon players will get to the fourth map in the game, Cryo Archive. Bungie built something that felt fun to the sweaty game devs and playtesters, and then it flopped on release. And this isn’t me saying this, Bungie has admitted it. In just the first season of release, they pivoted and tried to create modes that evened the playfield for casual players. For season two they are talking about PVE modes (where you fight the game instead of each other). Whatever the hardcore players were saying, the sales data was saying something much louder. Not enough people wanted what they had built.

Ignore your readers, but don’t ignore your income. When the first WOOL story took off, I read all the Amazon reviews that poured in, but what I mostly listened to were the sales figures. My other books weren’t selling as well. Readers wanted more in this world of the silos. Again, the trickiest skill is knowing when to tell more of a story and when to move on. Sales are a better broad indicator than your most glowing 5-star review or worst 1-star review. Back up. Zoom out. And don’t forget the creativity that got you here.

There are three things Bungie could have done, and any of them would’ve been better than resurrecting an old pixelated game we’d all forgotten and jamming it into the latest craze that only fringe players loved. The first is to close the trilogy with a Destiny 3. This is what most of the players were clamoring for, and trilogies are a thing for a reason. That’s generally when you need to wrap things up and move on to what’s next. The problem for Bungie is that they had shown a tendency to recycle old content in a new engine, rather than cook up something new. Many of the maps and missions in Destiny 2 are straight from Destiny 1, just with better graphics. Destiny 3 couldn’t just be the same game with a new shine. But that’s probably what they would’ve done.

Another option is to create the extraction shooter they were dying to make, but do it in the Destiny universe. The Destiny PVP players have been screaming about the lack of attention their modes get. These are largely the players who have moved over to Marathon and sing its sweaty praises. Imagine if Bungie had created an extraction mode of Destiny 2 where players load into a new universe and risk their loot, hopefully to bring back stronger, newer weaponry into the PVE modes of Destiny. As a PVE player, you’d see someone wielding a new more powerful gun, and the only way to get it was to purchase and play the extraction mode. The reason for the extraction mechanic could even match in-game lore. Destiny 2 had just wrapped up a campaign to save the solar system. Perhaps players were now being sent to the alien homeworld that had threatened them, but getting back and forth was less reliable. If you die there, the best we can do is reboot an old version of you with whatever stuff you left here at home. But if you get back, you might return with something that helps us turn the tide in this war. The extraction element is baked right in to where the story was going. And the thirst for the latest and greatest loot is a powerful lure for even the PVE players.

The third option would’ve been to email some sci-fi authors and build something new from scratch. This is what got you here. Trust that you can do it again. If you want to create a fringe game that winks at your early works, do it on a low budget on the side. But don’t think that everyone gets your 8-bit jokes or that the YouTuber who plays 80 hours a week is enough audience to recoup a quarter billion in development. Neither are true. Most of us want to teleport someplace new, fall in love with a world and story, and keep the mementos we earn along the way.

Proof? Last year, the hit game that won all the awards and sold millions of copies was Clair Obscura 33, a single-player game with an impeccable story and addictive gameplay. No attempt to milk players with microtransactions or a “live service” game. No PVP modes, where you have professionals and hackers destroying the difficulty curve. Just a phenomenal work of art that rivals any film or book released last year, zero exaggeration. This year, the breakout hit has been Crimson Desert, a single-player game that gives you a living, breathing world in which to tell and experience your own story, however you choose. Over five million copies sold, enough that the developer gave every employee a hefty bonus. These games offer story and immersion, the very things that Bungie excelled at. And it’s been an absolute trainwreck.