A Thank You to Sony, Microsoft and Bungie for a smooth Destiny launch

Yesterday, while browsing the Reddit, I stumbled across a post that brought attention to something I didn’t think twice about. Aside from maybe a few isolated incidents, this week’s launch of Destiny was about as smooth as one could hope for. I don’t know how many people purchased the game, but judging by the $500 million in day one sales and the record-breaking pre-order numbers, I’d assume quite a few.

And ya know what? I didn’t think anything of it. Then the post pointed out something else: that if PSN or Xbox LIVE went down as a result of such high demand, everyone would be raising hell. We’ve seen it time and time again with online games — SimCity, Diablo 3, and GTA Online, to name a few.  

Too often we are quick to pounce on developers and platform holders anytime there’s an issue with a game’s launch. To be fair, when you’re paying for a product, you expect it to work as intended. Still, we’re so eager to complain when things go wrong that we rarely stop and praise a developer or company when they do something right.

To be completely transparent, when it comes to eyeballs, posts about things going wrong attract way more attention than a post about, well, something working as intended. It's not news if it works as intended. From a consumer standpoint, it’s much easier to be driven to the point of complaint than it is to write a compliment.

So Sony, Microsoft, and Bungie, consider this my thank you for a smooth Destiny launch.

Maybe it has something to do with pre-loading alleviating the launch day stress on servers. Maybe Sony, Microsoft and the rest of the industry have finally figured it out. Whatever the case, Destiny’s smooth launch could signify a change in the industry — a future in which there’s reason for more posts thanking a company for good service and less for complaining when a game isn’t running flawless at launch.

[Thank you to Reddit user dnekuen for pointing this out to me]