Destiny had 3 paid expansions in the first year of release, so that doesn’t hold much weight.
Not the point, which is that games don’t just keep pumping content out in perpetuity without income. This isn’t difficult.
But it’s a meaningless statement, because developers don’t keep pumping out content in perpetuity, even WITH paid DLC.
They create content for some finite period of time.
So then the question becomes, “Can a company create quality content for some finite period of time, without forcing players to buy paid DLC?”
And the answer is then, obviously, "Yes.”
Titanfall 2 did it. Overwatch does it.
It’s perhaps worth stating that they actually do have revenue streams, in the form of purely cosmetic stuff you can pay money for.
Never said they couldn’t do it without paid DLC. In fact, I explicitly acknowledged that they could have.
The point you added at the end is the important one (about the revenue streams). Of course, you could argue Destiny does that as well, but I hope we can agree that the bright engram stuff is pretty minor in the scheme of things. They absolutely could have built the game around cosmetics as a major factor. People pay gobtons of money for cosmetics in League of Legends and Path of Exile and others.
I think the Destiny DLC, for all it’s bone-headed implementation, is significantly more content than Titanfall DLC.
Yeah, I would agree, at least as far as pve content… I think that Titanfall 2 offered quite a lot more in terms of added PvP content than destiny ever did though.
“We expect these changes to go live tomorrow at the end of scheduled maintenance to deploy Update 1.1.1.1. Moving forward, we are also looking to improve on Heroic Strikes, with new challenges, new Modifiers, and free access for all players.”
At least it’s something!
The best Bungie can do now is to make the Prestige Raid drop 300 LL items, and the Normal Raid to drop 330 LL items.
I suspect companies make decisions about which monetization path to follow based on numbers. As these companies are in the business to make money, not make games (games are simply what they are making money from at this point in time), those decisions are never, ever going to be based on what’s good for consumers, for game design, or anything else. Ultimately to change how games are monetized you have to change the cash flow equations.
That is, until consumers actually rebel against something, as with Battlefront II, sort of, nothing will happen. And even then, it’s pretty clear that for many, many gamers, the current systems of monetization are perfectly ok.
This is certainly true.
It’s actually part of what made me support Titanfall 2 as much as I did… in that they are, once again, a small developer who seemed to actually be more focused on making the game, rather than just making a monetization tool.
As a software developer, I fully support developers getting paid well. But we shouldn’t lose sight of what we’re doing.
Loot boxes.
Destiny 2 also has loot boxes, but the contents aren’t great and I doubt they’re pulling in a fraction of what Overwatch is.
What’s in them? Are they mostly cosmetic, or did they have gameplay benefits? I admit I have really no idea of what Overwatch is all about, but I’m pretty sure it’s only a competitive PvP thing.
Skins, sprays, emotes, victory poses, play of the game intros, etc. It’s really well done. The skins and character animations are good enough that you want to buy them, but they have zero impact on the game. No one is going to boot you from a team for not having Police D-Va.
The closest thing Destiny has is Shaders, Ships, and Emotes, all of which are in loot boxes. None of them are very exciting.
Theres like 4 models for ships and even the exotic versions of the ships are a paint job over one of these 4 existing models.
But thats the release work, and for the DLC/Seasons are creating ships with much more imagination.
Dances, I love, but they are lost in a sea of other stuff you get with a loot box. Also for whatever reason you can only equip ONE emote, so you are pretty limited on the mileage you can get for your emotes.
Shaders, the situation with shaders is awful. Could be worse.
Ghost, similar to ships. The release ghost are ugly paintjobs on existing models, the DLC/Seasons have much more imagination put to them. Ghost can be kind of useful in a pay to win way, but is negligible.
Recently they added a effect on player apparition that seems to be very popular and I can’t understand why.
I would be happy if we remove the word “content” from our vocabulary. I myself. I feel dirty every time I say it.
That is one thing about the game that’s irritating, though certainly in a minor way - the ships don’t look nearly as cool. I actually really liked the design of the first ship you got at the beginning of the first Destiny, and I used it through the rest of the game. Nothing else I’ve seen in Destiny 2 looks very cool at all to me.
There’s an exotic ship that looks like that original ship, fingers crossed for a bright engram.
See, I can get behind that change. In the original Destiny, the first ship was hands-down the best ship design. So there was no incentive to get a new ship. All the other ships looked terrible in comparison. But in Destiny 2, you start off with all the poor ships, and the original Destiny ship is the possible reward? Hell yeah, that’s doing things in the proper order.
Here we go, “Ikora’s Resolve”
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That’s not bad. Do I need to have the expansion to get this?