Things are heating up between publisher Activision and developer Bungie over the performance of Destiny 2 to date.
In an investor call last week, impossibly-named Activision Blizzard COO and president Collister Johnson said that the sci-fi MMO wasn't quite meeting the numbers that it would like, despite the most recent expansion - Forsaken - being of a really high quality.
Clearly not happy with these comments, Bungie director Luke Smith has said via Twitter (below) that it isn't disappointed with this new round of content and that the studio would be continuing to make content that fans love moving forwards.
We'd certainly love to be a fly on the wall at Bungie and Activision's head offices to see just how this is going down internally. The relationship between the two has always been somewhat volatile, with things seemingly being at a constant boiling point during the development of the first Destiny, at least going of published accounts of what that period of time was like.
To be fair to Johnson, he didn't say he was disappointed in Forsaken specifically - more that Destiny 2 in general hasn't managed to re-engage the core fanbase to the degree that he might like.
Smith's defence, ironically, could actually be the indication that Forsaken hasn't done the numbers.Alternatively, it's possible that the game's director is simply defending the quality of what his staff is putting out as opposed to how engaged its fanbase is.
We are not disappointed with Forsaken. We set out to build a game that Destiny players would love, and at Bungie, we love it too.
— Luke Smith (@thislukesmith) November 10, 2018
Building Destiny for players who love it is and will remain our focus going forward.