In 2016, a change took place at Bungie. Many of the minds behind Destiny 1 left the studio, including Ryan Ellis. He was design director on Destiny 1 – The Taken King, the best moment in the shooter’s history. Ellis worked as head of Concord for the last 6 years. But that is now over after Sony’s shooter failed catastrophically on PS5 and Steam.
This is the story of Destiny: We still don’t know exactly why, but there was a rift at Bungie in May 2016. Looking back, the rift is so strange because the shooter had actually reached its creative peak in September 2015 with “Destiny – The Taken King”.
The version of Destiny 2 that was planned at the time, which was supposed to revolve around the character Mara Sov and which had already been presented to the fans, was scrapped. The game director in charge left Bungie. A hasty reboot of the game followed, which fell far short of fans’ expectations.
It was announced that Destiny would no longer be a shooter, but rather a “hobby”; the planned paid expansions for 2016 were cancelled. Destiny 2 had already been postponed by a year in January 2016.
In May 2016, Bungie CEO Harold Ryan left the studio he had worked at for 16 years and founded a new company. In the months and years that followed, several other key employees from Destiny 1 quit Bungie and joined their boss, who planned to develop several AAA multiplayer titles simultaneously in his new company and sell them to publishers.
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Ryan Elllis follows his boss to the new company, worked at Concord
This was one of the most important employees: Ryan Ellis has worked in a leading position at Bungie since 2009. He was Technical Art Director from 2009 to 2014 and even Creative Director from September 2014.
In 2015, he worked as design director on The Taken King and also made public appearances on behalf of Bungie, including in a video with Wil Wheaton (via YouTube).
Ellis left Bungie in June 2016, just one month after Harold Ryan.
He then followed his boss in January 2018 and joined the company “Probably Monsters” as game director. There he led the development of Concord, the new shooter, in the gaming studio “Firewalk Studio”, which was bought by Sony in 2023.
Ellis is said to have put all his love into Concord, now resigns as boss
How is he doing now? After 6 years of work on Concord, it took only a few weeks after a disastrous release for Sony to take the shooter off the market.
Since then, the Firewalk studio has apparently been stuck in no man’s land. Nobody knows what will happen next. They are awaiting Sony’s decision, as Kotaku knows.
According to a report from Kotaku, Ryan Ellis told staff last week that he was stepping down from his job as game director and moving into a supporting role.
Kotaku quotes a former Concord developer as saying that Ryan believed strongly in Concord and thought the game would bring players together. He was a great person with a big heart who invested a lot of himself into the game and took on a lot of stress in the process: Why did Concord fail so badly on Steam and PS5 and Sony burn $250 million on a woke disaster?