Destiny Makes More Than $500 Million On First Day
Activision Blizzard subsidiary Activision Publishing announced on Wednesday that Destiny has become the biggest new franchise launch in history, scoring more than $500 million on its very first day. The game launched at midnight on Tuesday in over 178 countries.
Destiny is Bungie's first game since it exited the Halo scene back in 2010 with the release of Halo: Reach. Bungie became a privately held studio in 2007 and signed a ten-year deal with Activision Blizzard in April 2010. The studio reported that it partnered with Activision because of the publisher's "global reach, multi-platform experience and marketing expertise."
According to the publisher, Destiny has broken a pre-purchase record for a new IP, raking in the most pre-orders in the industry's history. The game also saw a huge crowd on the consoles back when the beta launched in July.
In addition to the game, Activision Blizzard also revealed the Destiny Expansion Pass. This "pass" provides two expansions that will add new single-player missions, multiplayer arenas and cooperative activities. These packs will also introduce new armor, gear and weapons. The Destiny Expansion Pass will cost $34.99, but gamers can purchase each expansion separately for $19.99 when they launch.
"In Destiny, you are cast as a Guardian of the last city on Earth, able to explore the ancient ruins of our solar system in a social, living universe filled with other players. You will journey through environments spanning the red dunes of Mars to the lush jungles of Venus while creating your own legend as you and your friends venture out into the stars to reclaim the treasures and secrets lost after the collapse of humanity," the press release said.
Destiny is available now for the PlayStation 4, the PlayStation 3, the Xbox One and Xbox 360. On that note, we have to wonder what the pre-order and final purchase numbers would have looked like had Destiny also landed on Windows PC. Would the game have broken the 1 billion mark on its first day like Call of Duty: Ghosts did last year?
Will Destiny ever arrive on the PC? During E3 2014, Erik Hirshberg, the CEO of Activision Publishing, indicated that a PC version would make sense. However, Bungie senior writer Eric Osborne added that the team doesn't want to compromise the core experience given that an extra platform is more work for the team.
"We have a lot of people who play on PCs. We have a lot of appetite to build that experience," Osborne told Polygon. "We haven't announced it yet, but we're looking forward to talking more about that kind of stuff in the future."
Follow Kevin Parrish @exfileme. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

Cross-Platform please!
Please dont give us this different draw range BS. Every PC game has different settings and we don't see people crying.
Cross-Platform please!
Considering it's a philosophical remake of Halo, though, I doubt us PC gamers will be seeing it ANYTIME soon.
Good thing it's slated for a PC release then. Well not confirmed but it was implied by Bungie. (and let's be honest, this is from Activision, if there is money to be had on a platform they will produce for it).
Looking at early reviews it doesn't look great for Destiny. Many people complain that the game is just boring.
I'll be waiting patiently for the PC release. Hopefully some things get addressed between here and there.
Star citizen has over 50 million dollars in funding, and people wait for it every day.
THAT is the line between mainstream games and indie ones.
lol
If it was on pc too, then every proper gamer will have a gaming pc and want it for that platform - how many of those will pirate it is hard to say, but it's just simpler to ignore the pc initially unfortunately.
This info is based on a press release citing what the publisher SOLD-IN to retailers, not SOLD-THROUGH to actual consumers...
Activision merely SHIPPED half a billion dollars worth of product to stores on Day One... No word on how many copies they actually sold or how much money Destiny actually made on Day One...
If it was on pc too, then every proper gamer will have a gaming pc and want it for that platform - how many of those will pirate it is hard to say, but it's just simpler to ignore the pc initially unfortunately.
That argument is outdated and ridiculous, and has been proven so for a long time now.
The reason exclusives exist is because they make money and they sell consoles to teenagers whose parents don't know any better. The reason games don't come out for PC is because it's harder to code for PC and you simultaneously have to invest more into your graphics engine to make something that doesn't come out as a really cruddy console port.
As for piracy, you're way off base. The idiots who are going to steal games are going to do it regardless - just because something is a console game does NOT mean that it's free from piracy... the top five torrents on The Pirate Bay when you search for 'destiny' are pirated copies of the game that you can burn to disk and play on your console without paying for it.
That is not a new trend. There have been many studies, some of them rather questionable however, that have claimed that per-unit, piracy was more frequent on consoles. While I don't believe the statistics, I do like to believe that there are enough of us who only pirate games as an anti-capitalist attempt to keep game companies honest. (In other words, trying to unto what happened when companies realized they make a lot more money by making a bad game and not releasing a demo of it.) I know that a lot of us use 'downloaded' games just as a means of seeing if a game is worth the money, so that we can then take our limited funds and spend them to support companies that actually produce quality product.
Now, there are going to be plenty of kids who just want to get 'free games' to go along with their brand new alienware that mommy and daddy bought them, but there are also going to be kids who do that with their brand new xbox ones and ps4s, too. So no, piracy is not the motivating factor behind why companies don't release PC versions of games.
Sure your default Home Depot PC won't break the requisites to run AA+ games, but PC's GPU/CPU power grow leaps faster than the close to static console renovation cycle... There's simply NO console game that can't be run in a mid-range enthusiast PC.
What the publishers want to do is force the hand of gamers (be them PC or not) into buying an console. Want Destiny really bad, at it full glory? Get a last gen console.
F*cking no way, MS/Sony. I prefer to play Patience till my eyes roll out of my face instead of paying premium bucks for a piece of out-dated non-upgradable hardware.
While it still out of the PC realm, Destiny's destiny is not of my concern.
It's harder to code for PC? What? The new consoles are just PCs. Nothing exotic about their architecture. The contrary is true. With consoles you have to optimize a lot, with PCs who cares if the game doesn't run properly on current GFX cards or CPUs, let's wait for the next batch and for them to upgrade their hardware.
As for piracy, even though it exists on older consoles it's not as simple as on PC. For newer consoles, PS4 and Xbox One, well there's none at the moment.
It's harder to code for PC? What? The new consoles are just PCs. Nothing exotic about their architecture. The contrary is true. With consoles you have to optimize a lot, with PCs who cares if the game doesn't run properly on current GFX cards or CPUs, let's wait for the next batch and for them to upgrade their hardware.
As for piracy, even though it exists on older consoles it's not as simple as on PC. For newer consoles, PS4 and Xbox One, well there's none at the moment.
It is harder to code for the PC, because you have to deal with the fact that their hardware setup could be nearly anything. For a game development company, giving options and making sure it runs well on high end and low end hardware both is a lot harder than optimizing it for one single set of hardware like the consoles have. Not every game company is going to want to produce another Metro by not caring if it should run well or not.
Yes, it's easier on PC, but at the same time, there are a lot more console gamers out there. I'm just saying... claiming that the only reason developers don't make games for the PC is because they might get pirated is just silly. Show me a highly-pirated PC game that isn't also highly successful and I'll bow down, but claiming that PC games don't make money because of piracy just isn't true.