Destiny 2 director admits Bungie had previously almost given up on PvP because it didn't "move the needle"

gamesradar.com:

Laying out Destiny 2's long-smoldering Crucible woes, game director Joe Blackburn says the studio was at one point unsure of the viability of PvP altogether because it hadn't "seen it move the needle."

Speaking with PC Gamer, Blackburn recounts his return to Bungie in 2020 and describes the general mood around PvP at the time. "I'm not so sure about this thing in the long run," he recalls. "We haven't seen it move the needle. Have we ever been able to satisfy the PvP audience? How do we deliver players what they want?"

This read wasn't exclusive to 2020, either. "Throughout Destiny 2 – for maybe its first six years, including Destiny 1 – there was a sense of: 'Hey, we're putting a bunch of effort into [PvP], but it's not what the community wants," he adds. "Or we're not making them happy'. Even when we put out maps, people would say: 'I don't like these maps, and I wish they were different.'" (Destiny 2 infamously went almost three years without a new PvP map, though it now has some more maps coming soon.) Oppositely, the director says PvE content like the Menagerie was consistently well-received, and that sort of feedback inevitably incentivizes devs to make more well-received things like it. 

Blackburn says he himself always regarded PvP as a core tenet of Destiny 2, and one of his first decisions as game director was to affirm that, "Hey, we have to support this thing. We have to figure out how it makes sense."

Fast forward to today and Blackburn has, on the heels of Bungie's disastrous State of the Game blog post, just promised the formation of a new PvP "strike team" explicitly built for more and bigger updates to the Crucible, including a proper map pack. For PvP enthusiasts, this follows multiple years defined by