Now, the most expensive video game ever made is out today.
Development and marketing of Destiny cost $500 million.
It's a futuristic shooter from the company that created the popular Halo games
and from the publisher of the Call of Duty franchise.
So, both companies are hoping this will be the start of another long series.
So, is Destiny worth a half a billion dollar price tag?
Martin Robinson is the features editor at Eurogamer. And he joins me now live from London.
Martin is gonna tell us a little bit more about Destiny and what makes this game different.
And what makes it different, what makes it new, I think the first thing really is it's the first game from developer Bungie,
their first all new game in coming up to 13 years, which is quite some time.
Obviously they made Halo, which was an extremely successful series.
A lot of people are really excited to see what they're gonna do next.
Also, it's the first time there's been a massively multiplayer online World of Warcraft-like game on consoles.
So, that's exciting to see how that's gonna pan out.
And most importantly, I think, it's something new in an industry
which is very iterative, where every year we get a new Call of Duty, we get a new Mario.
This is something which is really genuinely new.
And that's something really, really exciting right now.
Let's... Martin, let's just talk about this multiplayer system.
Adding these multiplayer elements to single-player games...
just describe to us how that works and why that's important.
It's a really important part of the game's makeup.
It's what Bungie and Activision call a shared-world shooter.
So, effectively you could just be walking around going through the wastelands or going through a scorched Earth.
And then during your single-player campaign and at any point, another player could just be dropped into your game and could fight alongside you.
It just gives you a real sense of place, a real sense of being somewhere more social and sharing this world with other people,
which is really important in terms of immersion when it comes to playing a massive game like this.
Yeah, I mean, like 10 years ago, we talked about virtual worlds, but in a way we're really getting...
we're really moving in that direction in a more realistic fashion if that's the way games are going.
So, Destiny is said to have cost $500 million, half a billion dollars.
You've had a go. You've looked at it.
I mean, it looks incredible in terms of... it looks like a movie to me. It's amazing.
Do you think it was money well spent, then?
That $500 million, it's obviously an eye-watering amount of money,
but it is for effectively a 10-year deal, which is gonna be three games coming out over that 10 years,
multiple expansions, and quite feasibly this could stretch into the next generation of consoles.
I know we've just seen PlayStation 4 and Xbox One come out a year ago,
but feasibly the final Destiny game as part of this deal could be on the next-generation Xbox and PlayStation 5.
So, when you're thinking in those terms and thinking of a series, which could quite feasibly be the next Call of Duty, be the next Grand Theft Auto,
that $500 million kind of seems like a bit of a bargain for Activision.
Yeah, well, I was gonna say, you know, these days the game isn't all that it's about.
You've got merchandising. You've got marketing. You've got a whole world that goes with it.
In any of that... in those senses, is Destiny a game changer in any way?
It will be. It's... say, it's such a rich, deep universe.
And I'm sure that Activision won't miss any tricks in terms of exploring it beyond the world of the video game itself.
Halo had such a broad universe that encompassed... it encompassed books; it encompassed comics.
It was gonna encompass a film at some point, which sadly stalled, which Peter Jackson was behind.
I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point, we're gonna see a Destiny film of some kind or a Destiny TV series.
So, yeah, it's gonna go well beyond the video games themselves.