- coolmike699
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- Fabled Heroic Member
Posted by: MinersCat
Before I start, I want to stress that I am not trying to be a Bungie fanboy, but I can't promise anything. Read at your own risk!
Bungie are unlike most game developers. Their well-known laid back atmosphere at the workplace and their good humored nature and so on and so forth lead me to one question: how could Bungie afford to become what it is today?
In a market where risks are frowned upon by large name publishers and financiers, where companies tug at all the strings they can to extract more and more money from customers, or developers who, while developing great games, give by-the-book customer care, how could companies that generally care about their customers and put creative vision above the big dough (Bungie, Valve and Bethesda to a lesser extent) become so successful?
How did Bungie become Bungie?
Of course, we don't know how much Bungie has cut from their games to make them more marketable. Halo could have been radically different at its conception than the Halo we all know. We don't know how much was changed in the name of not taking risks.
Remember that everything we think we know about Bungie is given to us by marketing and publicity professionals. The photos, the tours, the interviews, everything is run through a whole bunch of people to ensure that it upholds a certain image.
Think about how a fast food burger looks in the ads, vs. how it looks in actuality. With Bungie, we never actually get to see the 'actuality' version. We just get the 'ad' version.
Now, I'm not trying to say that Bungie's publicity people are liars, or accuse them of anything. But it is important to remember that what we see is not the whole picture, and what we see is exactly what they want us to see. Every company does this.