Activision parted with Destiny 2 because 'it was not meeting financial expectations'

Activision Blizzard's quarterly earnings call took place today, and during the Q&A session at the end, Activision COO Coddy Johnson was asked for "more color" on parting ways with Bungie and the Destiny franchise. According to Johnson, the decision came down to three reasons.

"First, as you know, we didn't own the underlying Destiny IP," Johnson said. "And we do for all our other major franchises, which we think is not just a differentiator for us in the industry, but also controlling the underlying IP gives us the chance to move into new experiences and new engagement models, which also come with new revenue streams and of course structurally higher economics, when you own the IP."

"And that leads to probably the second factor in our decision process, which is, Destiny is highly critically acclaimed, high quality content, but it was not meeting our financial expectations."

The third reason, Johnson said, was that Activision's scarcest resource is developer talent, and Bungie was "tying up" some of that talent. "Which now, under the arrangement we've reached will be freed up after a short transition period," Johnson said.

In other news from the call, Activision Blizzard has begun laying off roughly eight percent of its workforce, which amounts to hundreds of employees.