In mid-October, Bungie announced the departure of one of the company's most popular employees. Dave "DeeJ" Dague had been at Bungie for 9 years, with his most recent four as the studio's Communications Director. While there were ups and downs, just like with Destiny and Destiny 2, DeeJ was very well-regarded due to his constant communications with the Bungie community. DeeJ has now announced his new position, joining Iron Galaxy Studios as Head of Communications.
At Iron Galaxy, DeeJ describes his role as two-fold. First, DeeJ will be building a new community team with the company. A leadership shift that saw COO Chelsea Blasko promoted to co-CEO with Adam Boyes led to the need for DeeJ's hiring and the studio's expansion. DeeJ's award-winning work with Bungie's community team uniquely qualifies him to lead Iron Galaxy into the future, as the studio's aspirations continue to grow.
The second role for DeeJ at Iron Galaxy heavily ties into the first. DeeJ will play a major part in Iron Galaxy's plans to launch a brand new game based on an original IP in the future. The community team DeeJ will be building will be, presumably, directly related to this game. That the game would need an entirely new community team and that Iron Galaxy hired Destiny 2's well-regarded community lead to run it is telling.
Luckily, Iron Galaxy didn't leave its fans speculating, or at least not entirely. The game that Iron Galaxy is working on is described as a "multiplayer melee combat" game. While it isn't explicitly stated that the new game will be an online or live service experience, the hiring of DeeJ and the community team expansion would very likely imply that. Interested parties will just have to wait until Iron Galaxy is far enough along in development to comfortably share more information about the project.
This move is a major shift for Iron Galaxy. The studio is best known for its ports of AAA games. For example, four of its past five projects have been bringing Overwatch and Diablo 3 to Nintendo Switch, as well as Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy and Spyro Reignited Trilogy to PC. The fifth was the original game Extinction, an action game that was widely criticized in 2018. Iron Galaxy is clearly talented and just needs to turn that into something as great as Divekick, but bigger.
The hiring of DeeJ is going to place a lot of pressure on Iron Galaxy to create something exciting. That DeeJ was willing to take the position should inspire confidence, too. Hopefully, DeeJ shares more information about Iron Galaxy's future plans soon.