This sci-fi video game which cost half a billion dollars is one of the most expensive in history: the sequel is available for free on PS5, Xbox Series and PC

Game news This sci-fi video game which cost half a billion dollars is one of the most expensive in history: the sequel is available for free on PS5, Xbox Series and PC

Destiny, the $500 million game

Ten years earlier, Activision Blizzard was preparing to spend $500 million to make Destiny the next sci-fi epic worthy of Halo. According to Bobby Kotick, who revealed the sum at the Milken conference in Los Angeles that same year, the figure included both development and marketing costs.. Four years earlier, the publisher signed a 10-year deal with Bungie, the creator of Destiny, in hopes of launching the next big video game property. “If you bet $500 million, you can't take that risk with someone else's intellectual property“. Destiny's colossal budget then appeared to be among the highest ever for a video game. Ultimately, on May 6, 2015, Activision Blizzard announced that Destiny and Hearthstone had generated nearly $1 billion for the company. The year before, Grand Theft Auto V cost more than $280 million before grossing $1 billion in just three days.

What's good to know is that you can play its sequel for free. Born from the collaboration between Bungie, the studio behind the Halo series, and Activision, Destiny 2 was released in 2017, offering an ambitious sequel to the first opus. From the start, the title adopted a game-as-a-service model, with regular updates, expansions and seasons. Recently, Bungie hit hard with the latest Destiny 2 expansion: the DLC The Final Shape (or “La Forme Finale” in French) scored a superb score of 93/100 for its PS5 version, enough to place the expansion among the best content of the year. This stage marks the conclusion of the “Light and Darkness” saga, begun at the time in 2014 by the 1st Destiny. Players here embody Guardians, responsible for preventing the Witness, an evil cosmic entity, from rewriting the universe as he wishes. To achieve this, they will have to penetrate the heart of the Traveler, the source of their powers, and explore a mysterious new area called the Pale Heart.

Bungie's next project

Remember that Bungie is currently working on its next game, Marathon, a project started after almost 10 years dedicated to the development of Destiny, Destiny 2 and their expansions. The game will be an extraction shooter, a genre made particularly famous by Escape from Tarkov. However, it is difficult to obtain more information on the subject, especially since rumors in the corridors indicate turbulent developments in Bungie's premises. Remember that the company also suffered a wave of layoffs recently. Departures which notably concern Chris Barrett, who until then served as director, an investigation having revealed inappropriate behavior towards several women within the studio.