Activision: Destiny 2 Sales Failed to Meet Expectations, Speed Up New Content & New Opportunities for Monetization

destiny 2 down

If you’ve been keeping tabs on Destiny 2 news, you might have seen that Activision has made the game free on PC for a limited time, and has even rolled out free trials for the PvP mode of its newest expansion, Destiny 2: Forsakan’s Gambit mode. As it turns out, there’s a very good reason for that, and it’s due to low Destiny 2 sales.

This was revealed in Activision’s latest earnings call. Here’s an excerpt of what Activision exec Collister Johnson said regarding Destiny 2. While monthly active users were up from Q2, the publisher admits the game did not meet internal commercial expectations, and that there’s work to do in order to reengage the Destiny 2 fan base.

Activision monthly active users were 46 million, up sequentially from Q2. This sequential growth was driven by Destiny’s expansion, Forsaken, and by new reach initiatives, which grew Destiny monthly active users quarter on quarter and year over year. Now while Forsaken is a high-quality expansion with strong engagement and new modes of play, it did not achieve our commercial expectations, and there’s still work to do to fully reengage the core Destiny fan base.

In another part of the call, Spencer Adam Neumann, also from Activision, stated that for the fourth-quarter and full-year outlook, the publisher wants to improve the speed of new content releases for Destiny 2, and to “provide new opportunities for monetization.”

Our recent major launches for World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and Candy were all very successful and will set the stage for continued opportunities in 2019. Some of our other franchises, like Destiny, are not performing as well as we’d like, and we’re working to accelerate the pace of live operations innovation and improve the speed with which we release new content to keep our players engaged and to provide new opportunities for monetization.

Anyone surprised by this? If you’re a Destiny 2 player, how can Activision add in new monetizatino opportunities without making the game a grind? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Source: SeekingAlpha (login required)

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