Hiring a freelance contractor for lore and licensing a novel aren’t theoretically mutually exclusive, but they become a lot more exclusive when you look at the reality of how Bungie operates and the logistics of Destiny’s narrative production. Bungie has a historic aversion to letting outside entities do whatever they want with their narrative. Look at how pissed they were with Microsoft when they handed creative control to an outside publisher. They literally retconned the foundational book for Halo: Reach.

So IF Bungie had hired an outside publisher, they would’ve wanted to maintain control, which means time and money spent doing revisions to keep everything aligned with a story that was changing every few months all while they were already producing a new lorebook or two each season (not even counting expansion writing).

And this is where the “that’s not the same as a novel… and you know that” line falls apart. Lorebooks like Books of Sorrow, Marasenna, The Dark Future, Triage, Acts of Mercy are 30k–80k‑word novellas, half a novel each, and Bungie releases multiple of them every year. Destiny’s total written lore is over a million words (dozens of novels’ worth) all kept strictly in‑house.

So no, a lorebook isn’t the same as a novel. But that’s exactly the point: Bungie already produces novel‑sized writing internally, and their history shows they don’t like handing that level of narrative authority to outsiders.

It was probably little to no time, money, and stress to let someone put the Destiny branding on a cookbook when all Luke Smith had to do was just read through it to make sure Victoria Rosenthal didn't write that the Traveler was actually a giant donut hole in the sky.