Ex-Bungie board member and composer Marty O’Donnell has stated Bungie’s take care of Activision was “as bad as we thought it to be.”
According to an interview O’Donnell did with the HiddenXperia YouTube channel, the Bungie partnership with Activision was made to ensure that the agency to have management over the IP, as different “big players during that period” wouldn’t agree to try this, together with Microsoft.
From the beginning, O’Donnell had reservations about signing the deal, however because the agency promised Bungie complete management over the Destiny IP, a deal was in the end made.
However, over the course of the connection, each firms had totally different targets for what Destiny was alleged to be, and in the end, the partnership dissolved. Despite being portrayed as an amicable break up, it was not a “marriage made in heaven,” in keeping with O’Donnell.
“Because I was in leadership and on the board of directors when we went with Activision, if there is any blame for going to Activision, I am part of it,” he stated. “There had been seven of us complete I believe [that] made that take care of Activision. We knew it was a threat proper from the get-go, and it turned out to be precisely as unhealthy as we thought it to be.
“I’m the one one who’s gonna say that, besides anybody who not works for Bungie, and anybody who not works for Bungie is gonna say, ‘yeah, it was unhealthy from the beginning,’” (thanks, GI.biz).
“We launched this franchise with Activision, naturally and over the course of time we both decided we had different goals for what we wanted it to be, so we both went our separate ways.”
Bungie and Activision parted ways in 2019, with the developer gaining full publishing rights to the Destiny franchise.
Activision signed a 10-year deal in 2010 with the studio to publish Destiny. The contract was an “exclusive 10-year partnership,” with Activision holding unique, worldwide rights to publish and distribute all future Bungie games based mostly on the IP.
