TheGamingEconomy’s Daily Digest brings you the trending stories in gaming. In today’s news: Bungie delays Destiny 2 patch to avoid crunch; Harry Potter Wizards Unite shifts 400,000 units in first 24 hours; and subscription model won't replace traditional game sales - Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment president.

Bungie delays Destiny 2 patch to avoid crunch

Bungie has delayed the release of a patch to online fps Destiny 2 in order to preserve the “work-life balance” of the development team. The patch, designed to balance gameplay issues caused by an over-powered in-game weapon, has been delayed until early July. The news is significant as crunch, the much-criticised practice of mandatory overtime, continues to be a prevalent issue during game development.

Speaking on the GuardianCon 2019 charity livestream, Luke Smith, creative director at Bungie, stated: “We're having the conversation about [crunch], is it worth doing that? Or is it worth preserving work-life balance and ship it later, in July? That's the 100%, god's honest truth. It's always a cost-benefit analysis for people who are working super hard."

Harry Potter Wizards Unite shifts 400,000 units in first 24 hours

Harry Potter Wizards Unite, the new mobile AR title from Pokemon Go developer Niantic, has sold 400,000 units in its first 24 hours, according to data from Sensor Tower. At least USD$300,000 (£235,300) has been spent by players across the US and the UK in this time period.

While the free-to-play title demonstrates AR gaming is still capable of generating huge demand in its early days, the wizarding world has not yet caught the public eye on the same scale as its Pokemon predecessor. When the latter was first released, over 7.5 million users had downloaded it, with an estimated USD$2m (£1.57m) of in-game spending.

Subscription model won't replace traditional game sales - Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment president

David Haddad, president of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, has stated his belief that the subscription model being ushered in by cloud and streaming services won’t replace traditional game sales. Speaking to VentureBeat during this year’s E3 trade show, Haddad said: "I’d be careful about the notion that streaming will automatically bring the entire business to a subscription model. I just think there’s a lot of differences compared to other forms of media.”

While Haddad does not believe that streaming services, such as the upcoming Google Stadia, will completely replace the traditional sales model of gaming, there is an opportunity for streaming platforms when addressing players who want to expand their gaming consumption. “There are gamers that want to consume way more than two or three games a year, which is sort of an average right now,” he said, “there may be people that like the consumption pattern of having a subscription so that they can try more games.”