Author: azeeadmin

Samsung’s look but don’t touch policy left many wondering precisely how committed the company is to its new robots. On the other hand, the company was more than happy to let me take the GEMS (Gait Enhancing and Motivation System) spin.

The line includes a trio of wearable exoskeletons, the A (ankle), H (hip) and K (knee). Each serve a different set of needs and muscles, but ultimately provide the same functions: walking assistant and resistance for helping wearers improve strength and balance.

Samsung’s far from the first to tackle the market, of course. There are a number of companies with exoskeleton solutions aimed at walking support/rehabilitation and/or field assistance for physically demanding jobs. Rewalk, Ekso and SuitX have all introduced compelling solutions, and a number of automotive companies have also invested in the space.

At this stage, it’s hard to say precisely what Samsung can offer that others can’t, though certainly the company’s got plenty of money, know how and super smart employees. As with the robots, if it truly commits and invests, if could produce some really remarkable work in this space.

Having taken the hip system for a bit of a spin Samsung’s booth, I can at least say that the assistive and resistance modes do work. A rep described the resistance as feeling something akin to walking under water, and I’m hard pressed to come up with a better analogy. The assistive mode is a bit hard to pick up on at first, but is much more noticeable when walking up stairs after trying out the other mode.

Like the robots, it’s hard to know how these products will ultimately fit into the broader portfolio of a company best know for smartphones, TVs and chips. Hopefully we won’t have to wait until the next CES to find out.

A pair of highly-funded gaming unicorns are publicly skirmishing and the deal could have major repercussions for game developers.

Today, UK-based cloud gaming startup Improbable, announced that Unity, a hugely popular game development engine, had terminated their license, effectively shutting them out from one of their top customer sources. If permanent, the license termination would be a significant blow to Improbable, which enables studios to host large online multiplayer games across multiple servers. The gaming startup has raised more than $600 million from top investors like Softbank, Andreessen Horowitz and Horizons Ventures.

Just how many Improbable customers utilize Unity as their game engine of choice through the SpatialOS GDK is unknown, but the two platforms do share some similarities in appeal among small teams looking to innovate. “Unity is a popular engine and that popularity extends to the people using our [game development kit],” an Improbable spokesperson told TechCrunch. Improbable’s SpatialOS platform also runs on the Unreal Engine and CryEngine and can be designed to work with custom engines.

So, how’d this happen?

The way Improbable told it this morning, Unity changed their Terms of Service last month and then, without warning, pulled the rug out from under them. That’s not how Unity sees it though, the company penned a terse blog post in response, alleging that Improbable was well aware that they were in violation of the ToS.

“More than a year ago, we told Improbable in person that they were in violation of our Terms of Service or EULA. Six months ago, we informed Improbable about the violation in writing. Recent actions did not come as a surprise to Improbable; in fact, they’ve known about this for many months,” the post reads.

Unity developers using SpatialOS spent the day complaining about the move and wondering whether their projects in development would have to be completely reshaped. While the folks at Improbable also seemed unsure about this detail, Unity clarified in its blog post that SpatialOS projects that were live and in production would still be supported.

Unity’s Terms of Service isn’t exactly the most lucid reading material, but the section in question titled Streaming and Cloud Gaming Restrictions seems to lay out a fairly clear rebuke of what Improbable does.

You may not directly or indirectly distribute the Unity Software, including the runtime portion of the Unity Software (the “Unity Runtime”), or your Project Content (if it incorporates the Unity Runtime) by means of streaming or broadcasting so that any portion of the Unity Software is primarily executed on or simulated by the cloud or a remote server and transmitted over the Internet or other network to end user devices without a separate license or authorization from Unity.

The vagueness of the language does seem to give Unity broad discretion to wield the hammer.

The question, then, is why Improbable seems to have been targeted. Asked for comment, a Unity spokesperson referred us to their blog post. The answer probably lies in the “partnership” that both Unity and Improbable elude they were in the process of reaching, i.e. Unity likely wanted Improbable to pay up if they were going to be hosting the Unity Runtime on Improbable servers, but the two couldn’t come to an agreement.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, whose company operates the rival Unreal Engine, seemed to rebuke Unity on Twitter, suggesting that engines need to be more transparent in the governing rules they establish.

Regardless, it now appears that Improbable realizes they may have pissed off the wrong powerful partner.

In a much more contrite blog post published later this afternoon, the team wrote, in part:

We apologize that this event we instigated has created so much uncertainty, confusion and pain for so many developers who really do not deserve this…

As a platform company, we believe humility and introspection are critical responses to the suffering of your community, however it comes about. We invite every company involved in today’s discourse to do a little of that.

We also invite Unity to participate in this broader thinking with us, whatever the outcome of our misunderstanding. You are an incredibly important company and one bad day doesn’t take away from all you’ve given us. Let’s fix this for our community, you know our number.

It sounds like Improbable became well aware throughout the course of the day that they are going to have be the ones to compromise here.

Amazon -owned smart doorbell maker Ring is facing claims that might give some smart home enthusiasts pause. Recent reports from The Intercept and The Information have accused the company of mishandling videos collected by its line of smart home devices, failing to inform users that their videos would be reviewed by humans and failing to protect the sensitive video footage itself with encryption.

In 2016, Ring moved some of its R&D operations to Ukraine as a cost saving move. According to the Intercept’s sources, that team had “unfettered access to a folder on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service that contained every video created by every Ring camera around the world.” That group was also privy to a database that would allow anyone with access the ability to conduct a simple search to find videos linked to any Ring owner. At this time, the video files were unencrypted due to the “sense that encryption would make the company less valuable” expressed by leadership at the company.

At the same time the Ukraine team was allowed this access, Ring “executives and engineers” in the U.S. were allowed “unfiltered, round-the-clock live feeds from some customer cameras” even if that access was completely unnecessary for their work.

Ring reportedly leaned on its team in Ukraine, known as Ring Labs, to fill in the gaps for its troubled AI efforts. Those employees would comb through videos and manually tag objects in order to train software to one day be able to perform the recognition tasks. The videos included video from outside houses as well as video inside of them.

The company objected to the Intercept’s characterization of the situation, claiming that the training material was culled from public videos via a Ring app called Neighbors, a neighborhood watch app. It’s not clear that participants in the Neighbors app are aware that their videos are being reviewed manually by Ring’s “data operators” in Ukraine.

Ring provided the following statement to TechCrunch:

“We take the privacy and security of our customers’ personal information extremely seriously. In order to improve our service, we view and annotate certain Ring video recordings. These recordings are sourced exclusively from publicly shared Ring videos from the Neighbors app (in accordance with our terms of service), and from a small fraction of Ring users who have provided their explicit written consent to allow us to access and utilize their videos for such purposes. Ring employees do not have access to livestreams from Ring products.

We have strict policies in place for all our team members. We implement systems to restrict and audit access to information. We hold our team members to a high ethical standard and anyone in violation of our policies faces discipline, including termination and potential legal and criminal penalties. In addition, we have zero tolerance for abuse of our systems and if we find bad actors who have engaged in this behavior, we will take swift action against them.”

While it sounds like Ring may not have taken user privacy very seriously in the past, that attitude appears to have shifted upon the company’s acquisition by Amazon last year. The Information describes that scenario in reporting from December:

“After a visit by Amazon representatives to the Ukraine office in May, Amazon moved to restrict access to sensitive customer information, former employees said, requiring a digital key that could only be used from within the Kiev office.

But employees quickly found ways around the restriction. “We had to apply and get access. The Ukraine office wasn’t comfortable with this, so we found a workaround,” a former Kiev employee said. “Workers could then access the system from any computer, at home or anywhere.”

It’s impossible to know if Amazon is running a tight ship with Ring’s sensitive user data now, but it’s yet another reason to consider the privacy risks posed by smart home devices, particularly surveillance ones. Setting up an at-home panopticon might feel more secure, but know you might not be the only one keeping a watchful eye on your home.

Having established itself as a top streaming service with now over 200 million users, Spotify this year is preparing to focus more of its attention on podcasts. The company plans bring its personalization technology to podcasts in order to make better recommendations, update its app’s interface so people can access podcasts more easily, and broker more exclusives with podcast creators. It’s also getting into the business of selling ads within podcasts, as a means of generating revenue from this increasingly popular form of audio programming.

In fact, Spotify has already begun to dabble in podcast ad sales, ahead of this larger push.

Spotify, we’ve learned, has been selling its own advertisements in its original podcasts since mid-2018 year, including in programs like Spotify Original “Amy Schumer Presents: 3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “The Joe Budden Podcast,” “Dissect,” “Showstopper,” and others. With more exclusives planned for the year ahead, the portion of Spotify’s ad business focused on podcasts will also grow.

The company appears to be taking a different approach to working with podcasters than it does with it comes to working with music artists.

Today, Spotify gives artists tools that help share their work and be discovered – it invested in distribution platform DistroKid, for example, and now lets artists submit tracks for playlist consideration. With podcasters, however, Spotify wants to either bring their voices in-house, or at least exclusively license their content.

“Over the last year, we become very focused on building out a great podcast universe,” said Head of Spotify Studios Courtney Holt, speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. “The first step was to make sure that we’ve got the world’s best podcasts on Spotify, and integrated the experience into the service in a way that allowed people to build habits and behavior there,” he said.

“What we started to see is that the types of podcasts that really were working on Spotify were ones where they were really authentic voices…so we just decided to invest more in those types of voices,” Holt added.

Spotify’s collection of originals has been steadily growing over the past year. Last August, for example, Spotify nabbed an exclusive deal with the “Joe Budden” podcast, which is aimed at hip-hop and rap culture fans, and launched its first branded podcast, “Ebb & Flow,” focused on hip-hop and R&B. Its full original lineup today also includes “Dissect,” Amy Schumer’s “3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “Mogul,” “The Rewind with Guy Raz,” “Showstopper,” “Unpacked,” “Crimetown” (Its first season was wide, second season is exclusive to Spotify), “UnderCover,” and “El Chapo: El Jefe y su Juicio.”

At CES, Spotify announced the addition of one more –  journalist Jemele Hill is coming Spotify with an exclusive podcast called “Unbothered,” which will feature high-profile guests in sports, music, politics, culture, and more.

In growing its collection of originals, the company found that podcasters who joined Spotify exclusively were actually able to grow their audience, despite leaving other distribution platforms.

For example, the Joe Budden podcast had its highest streaming day ever after joining Spotify.

This has led Spotify to believe that influencers in the podcast community will be able to bring their community with them when they become a Spotify exclusive, and then further grow their listener base by tapping into Spotify’s larger music user base and, soon, an improved recommendation system.

There are other perks for Spotify, too – when users come to Spotify and begin to listen to podcasts, they often then spend more time engaged with the app, it found.

“People who consume podcasts on Spotify are consuming more of Spotify – including music,” said Holt. “So we found that in increasing our [podcast] catalog and spending more time to make the user experience better, it wasn’t taking away from music, it was enhancing the overall time spent on the platform,” he noted.

While chasing exclusive deals to bring more original podcasts to Spotify will be a big initiative this year, Spotify will continue to offer its recently launched podcasts submission feature to everyone else.

With this sort of basic infrastructure in place, Spotify now wants to help users discover new podcasts and improve the listening experience.

One aspect of this will involve pointing listeners to other podcast content they may like.

For instance, Spotify could point Joe Budden fans to other podcasts about hip-hop and rap. It will also leverage its multi-year partnership with Samsung to allow listeners pick up where they left off in an episode as they move between different devices. And it will turn its personalization and recommendation technology to podcasts – including the ads in the podcasts themselves.

“Think about what we’ve done around music – the more understand you around the music you stream, the more we can personalize the ad experience. Now we can take that to podcasts,” said Brian Benedik, VP and Global Head of Advertising Sales at Spotify, when asked about the potential for Spotify selling ads in podcasts.

The company has been testing the waters with its own podcast ad sales since mid 2018, Benedik said. The sales are handled in-house by Spotify’s ad sales team for the time being.

Benedik had also appeared on a panel this week at CES, where he talked about the value of contextual advertising – meaning, ads that can be personalized to the user based on factors like mood, behavior and moments. This data could be appealing to podcast advertisers, as well.

But to scale its efforts around podcast ads, Spotify will need to invest in digital ad insertion technology. Benedik told us Spotify is currently deciding whether that’s something it wants to build in-house or acquire outright.

Spotify’s rival Pandora went the latter route. It closed on the acquisition of adtech company Adswizz in May 2018, then introduced capabilities for shorter, more personalized ads in August. By November, Pandora announced it was bringing its Genome technology to podcasts, which allowed for a recommendation system.

Now Spotify aims to catch up.

The addition of podcasts has reoriented Spotify’s focus as company, Holt said.

“We’re an audio company. We’re trying to be the world’s best audio service,” he told the audience at CES. “It’s a pure play for us. We’re seeing increased engagement; there’s great commercial opportunities from podcasting that we’ve never seen on the platform…And, obviously, exclusives are to give us something that makes the platform truly unique – to have people come to Spotify for something you can’t get anywhere else is the sort of cherry on top of that entire strategy,” Holt said.

Image credits: Spotify

A funny thing happened at Samsung’s CES press conference. After the PC news, 8K TVs and Bixby-sporting washing machines, the company announced “one more thing,” handing over a few brief moments to announce a robotics division, three new consumer and retail robots and a wearable exoskeleton.

It was a pretty massive reveal in an extremely short space, and, quite frankly, raised far more questions than it answered. Within the broader context of a press conference, it’s often difficult to determine where the hype ends and the serious commitment to a new category begins.

This goes double for a company like Samsung, which has been taking extra care in recent months to demonstrate its commitment to the future, as the mobile industry undergoes its first major slowdown since the birth of the smartphone. It follows a similar play by LG, which has offered a glimpse into its own robotics plans for back to back years, including allowing a ‘bot to copilot this year’s keynote.

We all walked away from the press conference unsure of what to make of it all, with little more to show for things than a brief onstage demo. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to spend some quality time with the new robots behind the scenes the following day. There were some caveats, however.

First, the company insisted we watch a kind of in-person orientation, wherein a trio of miced up spokespeople walked us through the new robots. There’s Bot Care, a healthcare robot designed to assist with elder care, which features medication reminders, health briefings and the ability to check vitals with a finger scan. There are also yoga lessons and an emergency system that will dial 911 if a user falls.

There’s also Bot Air, an adorable little trash can-style robot that zooms around monitoring air quality and cleaning it accordingly. Bot Retail rounds out the bunch, with a touchscreen for ordering and trays in the rear for delivering food and other purchases.

The other major caveat was look, but don’t touch. You can get as close as you want, but you can’t interact with the robot beyond that.

The demos were impressive. The robots’ motions are extremely lifelike, with subtle touches that imbue on each a sense of personality rarely seen outside of movie robots like Wall-E. The response time was quick and they showed a wide range of genuinely useful tasks. If the robots are capable of performing as well in person as they do in these brief, choreographed demos, Samsung may have truly cracked the code of personal care and retail robotics.

That, of course, is a big if. Samsung wouldn’t answer the question of how much these demos are being orchestrated behind the scenes, but given how closely the company kept to the script, one suspects we’re largely looking at approximations of how such a human/robot interaction could ultimately play out somewhere down the road. And a Samsung spokesperson I spoke to admitted that everything is very early stages.

Really, it looks to be more akin to a proof of concept. Like, hey, we’re Samsung. We have a lot of money, incredibly smart people and know how to build components better than just about anyone. This is what it would look like if we went all-in on robotics. The company also wouldn’t answer questions regarding how seriously they’re ultimately taking robotics as a category.

You can’t expect to succeed in building incredibly complex AI/robotics/healthcare systems by simply dipping your toe in the water. I would love to see Samsung all-in on this. These sorts of things have the potential to profoundly impact the way we interact with technology, and Samsung is one of a few companies in a prime position to successfully explore this category. But doing so is going to require a true commitment of time, money and human resources.

Postmates, one of the earlier entrants to the billion-dollar food delivery wars, has raised an additional $100 million in equity funding at a $1.85 billion valuation, as first reported by Recode and confirmed to TechCrunch by Postmates. The round comes four months after the eight-year-old startup drove home a $300 million investment that finally knocked it into “unicorn” territory.

New investor BlackRock has joined the funding round alongside Tiger Global, which served as the lead investor of Postmates’ September financing. Led by co-founder and chief executive officer Bastian Lehmann, the company has garnered a total of $681 million in venture capital funding from investors, including Spark Capital, Founders Fund, Uncork Capital and Slow Ventures.

In line with several other tech unicorns, Postmates has begun prep for an initial public offering that could come this year, including tapping JPMorgan to advise the float. As Recode pointed out, the $100 million capital infusion was probably less of a necessary funding event but rather an opportunity for existing investors to liquidate stock ahead of an exit.

Postmates, which completes 3.5 million deliveries per month, reportedly expected to record $400 million in revenue in 2018 on food sales of $1.2 billion. The company has not confirmed that figure nor disclosed any other 2018 revenue numbers. The company currently operates in more than 500 cities, recently tacking on another 100 markets to reach an additional 50 million customers.

It will be interesting to see how Wall Street responds to a Postmates public listing. Though it was an early player in what has become an extremely crowded market, Postmates never emerged as the leader in food delivery. Now, with supergiants like Uber dominating via Uber Eats and SoftBank funneling loads of capital into Postmates competitor DoorDash, it shouldn’t count on an oversubscribed IPO.

Californians have a lot to enjoy — great weather, big waves, solid microbreweries, and of course extremely high taxes on prepaid mobile service. But this controversial last feature is being adjusted after a judge found at least part of the state’s Mobile Telephony Surcharge to be unconstitutional. As a result, bills could shrink by a couple bucks starting this month.

The tax, which funds various local services like 911 and so on, was raised in 2016 and depending on various factors could be around 20 percent of the bill. That turns a $50 bill into a $60 bill, which is especially rough when you consider that lower prepaid plans are often preferred by people with limited incomes. So the tax was unpopular from the start — not that many are particularly liked.

In addition to making users angry, it attracted the attention of wireless carriers: MetroPCS filed a lawsuit alleging that the way the tax was calculated conflicted with federal rules set by the FCC. The details are buried in a mound of legalese, but essentially the problem was that California was effectively taxing inter-state services as well as within-state ones, which is not allowed either by state or federal law.

The challenge took its course and although the California government argued that its tax was compliant with the FCC’s rules, the judge ultimately decided otherwise.

“The California Prepaid Mobile Telephony Services Surcharge Collection Act [i.e. the tax increase passed in 2014 and instituted in 2016], in its entirety, conflicts with federal law and therefore is preempted and unconstitutional,” she wrote in the order concluding the case.

Although California is appealing the case, the judge’s order prevents it from collecting the tax in the meantime. So as long as that injunction remains in place, mobile bills should see a small break.

It won’t be a lot — an example provided by T-Mobile showed total taxes and fees reduced by about $3. But hey, every little bit counts.

The actual amount you pay your carrier shouldn’t change, though. Your $40 or $75 plan will remain the same; it’s only the associated taxes that are effected. The way they’re listed may also change; for instance, AT&T is replacing the “Prepaid MTS Surcharge” line item with “CA Surcharges, Fees & Taxes.” Its announcement doesn’t explicitly mention a change in amount, but unless it adds a fee of its own to make up the difference, it seems that users there and at other carriers will see similarly lowered taxes.

If you’re curious how much your bill will drop, if at all, your best bet is to call customer service and ask them to check.

Researchers at Michigan State University are exploring the idea that there’s more to “social media addiction” than casual joking about being too online might suggest. Their paper, titled “Excessive social media users demonstrate impaired decision making in the Iowa Gambling Task” (Meshi, Elizarova, Bender and Verdejo-Garcia) and published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, indicates that people who use social media sites heavily actually display some of the behavioral hallmarks of someone addicted to cocaine or heroin.

The study asked 71 participants to first rate their own Facebook usage with a measure known as the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale. The study subjects then went on to complete something called the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), a classic research tool that evaluates impaired decision making. The IGT presents participants with four virtual decks of cards associated with rewards or punishments and asks them to choose cards from the decks to maximize their virtual winnings. As the study explains, “Participants are also informed that some decks are better than others and that if they want to do well, they should avoid the bad decks and choose cards from the good decks.”

What the researchers found was telling. Study participants who self-reported as excessive Facebook users actually performed worse than their peers on the IGT, frequenting the two “bad” decks that offer immediate gains but ultimate result in losses. That difference in behavior was statistically significant in the latter portion of the IGT, when a participant has had ample time to observe the deck’s patterns and knows which decks present the greatest risk.

The IGT has been used to study everything from patients with frontal lobe brain injuries to heroin addicts, but using it as a measure to examine social media addicts is novel. Along with deeper, structural research, it’s clear that researchers can apply to social media users much of the existing methodological framework for learning about substance addiction.

The study is narrow, but interesting, and offers a few paths for follow-up research. As the researchers recognize, in an ideal study, the researchers could actually observe participants’ social media usage and sort them into categories of high or low social media usage based on behavior rather than a survey they fill out.

Future research could also delve more deeply into excessive users across different social networks. The study only looked at Facebook use, “because it is currently the most widely used [social network] around the world,” but one could expect to see similar results with the billion-plus monthly Instagram and potentially the substantially smaller portion of people on Twitter.

Ultimately, we know that social media is shifting human behavior and potentially its neurological underpinnings, we just don’t know the extent of it — yet. Due to the methodical nature of behavioral research and the often extremely protracted process of publishing it, we likely won’t know for years to come the results of studies conducted now. Still, as this study proves, there are researchers at work examining how social media is impacting our brains and our behavior — we just might not be able to see the big picture for some time.

Sites like Amazon and eBay have made it very compelling for consumers to buy online rather than in stores, in part because prices are very competitive and in many cases cheaper than what buyers might find in traditional retailers. But in the U.K., it turns out that some of those low prices are in part due to sellers dodging taxes, so now the government is cracking down.

The U.K.’s tax authority has “red-flagged” 4,600 online merchants, from a total of 7,000 investigations, in the last two years that have been evading sales taxes on goods sold in the U.K. on major marketplace sites like Amazon and eBay. Many of those online stores have been shut down and deleted as a result, while those now selling to U.K. buyers legitimately are giving the U.K.’s tax coffers a £205 million ($255 million) boost.

The numbers are the latest milestones in a long-term, ongoing operation by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC). The authority has been working in conjunction with seven online marketplaces — Amazon, eBay, Fruugo.com, Wolf & Badger, Etsy, ASOS and Flubit — which last year signed on to cooperate in the investigation to identify merchants evading taxes by providing records of sales and other data obtained by the HMRC itself (we asked and it did not elaborate on what the latter entails).

The HMRC has estimated that between £1 billion and £1.5 billion ($1.3-1.9 billion) in collections were lost in a single year (2017) by companies failing to pay sales taxes on goods, with between £600 million and £900 million of that coming from overseas sellers.

The HMRC defines overseas sellers as a merchant that sells goods “in the UK to UK consumers and don’t have a business establishment in the UK.” Merchants based outside the EU that sell goods to U.K. consumers and then import them to the U.K. are also overseas sellers.

The Joint and Several Liability (JSL) notices — as the red flag notices are officially called — have been around since 2016, part of a wider remit both to identify tax loss and also weed out those who might be tricking the system to the detriment of U.K. businesses.

“Delivering a fair and level playing field for businesses is a top priority for this government,” said Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Mel Stride MP, in a statement. “These figures show that HMRC, working closely with the major online marketplaces, is making real headway tackling this serious and damaging evasion.”

But the agreements signed earlier this year with marketplaces like Amazon to help identify violating online sellers has given the program a boost: now, if a seller’s account does not get removed after it has been red-flagged, the marketplaces themselves become liable for any future sales taxes that the sellers incur. (It does not appear that they are liable for past taxes, though.)

The HMRC said that another consequence of the operation has been a boost in VAT (value-added tax, or sales tax) registrations by overseas companies. Between 2017 and the end of 2018, there were 58,000 VAT registration applications, compared to only 1,650 between 2015 and 2016.

Bungie, creator of the popular Halo and Destiny franchises, is splitting from publisher Activision and will go its own way, the company announced today. It’s almost certainly good news for gamers and the company itself, but it also won’t fix the problems that plagued Destiny and its sequel since their launches.

In a blog post, the company explained that the partnership had run its course:

We have enjoyed a successful eight-year run and would like to thank Activision for their partnership on Destiny. Looking ahead, we’re excited to announce plans for Activision to transfer publishing rights for Destiny to Bungie. With our remarkable Destiny community, we are ready to publish on our own, while Activision will increase their focus on owned IP projects.

The planned transition process is already underway in its early stages, with Bungie and Activision both committed to making sure the handoff is as seamless as possible

Bungie and Activision teamed up all those years ago essentially because the former needed a jump start to develop Destiny, and the latter was of course always looking for big titles to produce and milk for cash.

The deal was, briefly stated, $500 million for four games over ten years — which sounds reasonable on its face, but the first Destiny had a troubled development and took years to become the game people expected; the sequel infamously was rumored to have been rebooted less than a year and a half before release. Meanwhile both games needed a steady drip of new content to keep players online.

Pressure from Activision meant Bungie had to focus on meeting deadlines rather than pursue the “it’s ready when it’s ready” philosophy that companies like Rockstar have the luxury of. This may have contributed to the widely berated microtransation store built into Destiny 2 and the half-baked nature of its early content releases, like the much-maligned Curse of Osiris.

But ultimately these choices have been shown to be Bungie’s, and the responsibility rests on them as the developer. Delivering for both gamers and shareholders is tough, but that’s the deal they struck, and it seems as if they simply weren’t able to do it.

Getting the rights to Destiny back must have been like pulling teeth, but it may also be that Activision would rather cut Bungie loose while it’s ahead rather than attempt to rush the third entry in the series. Although both companies are being very polite about it right now, chances are the inside story will emerge soon; Kotaku’s Jason Schreier, who has followed the game and company closely for years, reported that champagne corks were flying at Bungie headquarters, so clearly some tension has been relieved.

History repeats, it seems: Bungie was originally an independent developer (and creator of the beloved Marathon games) and was acquired by Microsoft during the development of its breakout hit Halo. It later negotiated its independence from Microsoft, only to apparently walk into the same trap again a few years afterward.

What this means for Destiny players is unclear, but the trend away from yearly installments and towards longer development times and bigger payoffs has generally been a good one for players. If Bungie leans that way and Destiny 3 ends up coming out a year after it might have under Activision, it will almost certainly be better for it.