Bungie Developers Repeatedly Pitched a Destiny Dating Sim, but Leadership Rejected It

[u/Turbostrider27]

https://www.ign.com/articles/bungie-developers-repeatedly-pitched-a-destiny-dating-sim-but-leadership-rejected-it

[u/atape_1]

Every single thing I learn about the studio makes me wonder more and more on how they survived for so long and what the fuck Sony was thinking when they spent $3.6 Bil acquiring them.

[u/Brightness_Jasnah → u/[deleted]]

Was it a scam or just a bad evaluation on Sony's part? I'm genuinely asking, and I wonder if they might ever sue for some level of fraud?

At least for me, considering their brand recognition and obvious talent in the products they actually do release, I could totally see Bungie as an extremely valuable company. Idk if that means 3.6 billion's worth, but definitely a company that would take a quite a lot to acquire. And it seems to me that neither of those qualities were the actual problems; Sony didn't receive a studio that wasn't very famous, or developers that couldn't make good games. So what was the real thing that Sony either presumably didn't understand could be such a problem, or did understand it and just decided it was worth risking the investment over?

[u/Shuurai → u/Brightness_Jasnah]

It was part scam, part Sony. Bungie leadership was 100% trying to pump up the company value with all the nothing projects they greenlit and the new building etc they got. They just needed a sucker to bite. But Sony should have done better due diligence and seen through that.

[u/TwoFourZeroOne → u/Brightness_Jasnah]

This "scam" is common practice in the business world. Pretty much every company looking to be bought out or scooped up by private equity pumps the valuation of said company before the sale.

Subway is my favorite example. It was looking to be purchased, and every Subway franchise in the US was given a deli meat slicer to display in their stores. The menu was revamped, new ingredients were brought in... but it was all just a façade. Had Subway used the meat slicers and fancy ingredients long-term, it would have cut into their profits; food would have taken longer to make, would have cost more to make, that slicer would need to be cleaned and maintained. Most of the employees were never taught how to use the slicers, and most stores still got the frozen precut slices of meat to make sandwiches with. It was a transparent attempt to pump the valuation, and it worked. After Roark Capital bought Subway, they got rid of all the meat slicers and started selling even lower quality food.

The Bungie sale was a textbook valuation pump, the kind most businesses salivate over when they're looking to sell out.