Flop 3: Destiny and the dear money
In 2015 it sometimes seemed as if either Bungie’s headquarters were built on a cursed Indian burial ground, or it was some kind of drinking game at Bungie to purposefully mess things up when it was quiet. The recurring theme: the dear money and Destiny.
When the major expansion “The Taken King” was announced, there was a hefty digital collector’s package containing almost nothing that “day one players” needed, except for a few emotes and trinkets. For that they were supposed to pay a hefty premium and “buy and pay” for stuff they already had a second time. The veterans groaned: We are your most loyal customers, and you treat us this badly while you make lock offers for new customers, was the tenor. New customers received the year-2 package for a mere 20€ alongside the year-1 stuff that veterans had to pay a lot for a year ago.
That had already thrown the household blessings off balance, even without what happened next …
The straw that broke the camel’s back was Luke Smith, the game director, with an interview, to which he later said himself: I acted like an asshole. Smith explained to the interviewer that there would be no controversy if players could already see the emotes. Then they would “throw money at the monitor.”
This image of the excited player enthusiastically and quite mindlessly throwing their money at the monitor did not go down well with fans … surprisingly.
This was far from the only incident where money and Destiny played a strange role. The topic kept coming up: How much is a cash shop item worth, how much an expansion, how much the character boost, how does everything relate to each other? Should I really pay as much for a stupid racing book and a level 25 character as for the entire expansion?
For some console players, it was already an outrage in 2014 to have to repurchase anything for a full-price title, they regarded the 20-Euro DLCs as total overpriced “rip-offs”: They had cut that out of the game beforehand only to now hold out their hands again, one could read everywhere. Now the cash shop with its microtransactions is being eyed suspiciously. Every further offer brings the pay-to-win sin closer.
And Bungie is repeatedly struggling to communicate it properly.
Before cash shop emotes could be found for free in the world, players were advised to buy them while they could – soon that wouldn’t be possible anymore. The 30-Euro character boosts were not announced at all; they just appeared.
That with such a huge title, you keep misjudging and shifting from shitstorm to crisis is disappointing. If it were up to Bungie, players should talk about their adventures and fantasies in Destiny and not be constantly pulled back to the “real world.” There’s hardly anything so detrimental to gameplay as thinking in cents and euros all the time.
On the next page: A shaking of the power …
