14 DAY TRIAL // Publisher Activision has announced that Destiny currently has over 9.5 million registered users, and that the next chapter in the budding franchise is already in the works over at Bungie.
According to Activision Publishing Chief Executive Officer Eric Hirshberg, there are a lot of things going on within Bungie right now, with not only the next expansions after The Dark Below being in the works, but an entire new entry as well.
For the time being, it's too early to tell whether the next game release will be dubbed Destiny 2 or something different, or even how far away we are from the next iteration in the franchise, but things seem to be going pretty well nonetheless.
Activision claims that Destiny is the biggest new franchise launch in history and one of the top 10 largest game launches (the company added "in the United States), revealing that its player base averages around three hours of play time each and every day.
Destiny performed beyond Activision's expectations
Activision Chief Executive Officer Bobby Kotick has said that, so far, Destiny has sold much better than initially expected, marking yet another high-profile game beating Wall Street estimates, and showing a clear sign that the game industry is bouncing back.
The company's overall sales rose 78 percent year on year for its third fiscal quarter of the year, managing to beat various analysts' expectations by as much as 76 percent.
Electronic Arts and Take-Two Interactive, two of Activision's main competitors, have also seen strong sales this year, due in no small part to the presence of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, the new generation of consoles from Microsoft and Sony, respectively.
Although Activision has mentioned that Destiny has over 9.5 million registered players, that does not actually translate into actual purchases, as many gamers might have more than one account, but it's still a very solid number.
Bungie's pedigree helped cement Destiny's success
Kotick has attributed the success of the brand new intellectual property to its unique science fiction setting, something that Activision's other billion dollar first-person shooter franchise, Call of Duty, has not yet tackled, due to its realistic modern warfare setting.
Activision and Bungie signed a deal to continue the development of the Destiny franchise, allegedly for the next ten years, with the publisher pledging an investment of over $500 / €400 million to that end.
Bungie's former work includes the creation of the Halo franchise, one of the most successful in video games history, and a real platform seller for Microsoft's consoles. Halo is also a science fiction shooter, dealing with similarly grandiose things such as saving the universe and/or mankind, but lacking the online multiplayer shared universe of Destiny.
