Bungie says Destiny's development cost nowhere near $500 million

Destiny development was said to have cost $500 million, following comments from Activision CEO Bobby Kotick. That figure is nowhere close, according to Bungie's Pete Parsons. Rumour smashed, it seems.

Kotick's original claim can be found here, in which he said, "If you’re making a $500 million bet you can’t take that chance with someone else’s IP. The stakes for us are getting bigger.”

But now, speaking with GI.biz, Parsons cooled rumours swirling around the shooter's supposedly gargantuan budget.

Talking purely about Destiny's development budget, Parsons told the site, "For marketing you'd have to ask Activision people, but for development costs, not anything close to $500 million. I think that speaks a lot more to the long-term investment that we're making in the future of the product.

"We sat back, long before we even came to our partnership with Activision, thinking about, 'We wanted to tell a story over ten years.' We wanted each one of these things to have its own beginning, middle, and an end, but we really wanted to step back and we can do it. We've done it before; we did it with Halo but we didn't plan it out.

"I say plan - I don't know how the story goes, okay? But really, think about how do we future-proof our technology? What are the kinds of things we're going to want to do? How do we build our team? How do we even build the building that our team is going to be in?"

"We have the time to start building that out and that's incredibly powerful for us."

Parsons added that the idea of telling a ten-year story was Bungie's and didn't stem from Activision. He stressed that he company went to its publisher with its plan as an independent firm.

"If you have to leave a universe that you love behind, it couldn't be really a better thing to do it with," Parsons went on. "A newly independent company starting on a new, bold adventure, which is why the game is called Destiny - it was originally a code name for the game and we ended up liking it a lot and then changed the code name to Tiger, but yeah, because it spoke so much about where we were going and what we were doing that it became the thing we're focused on."

Destiny launches September 9 on PS4, PS3, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.