Let's say you've got a game that you want people to keep playing day in and day out, for years on end. If you're in the video game industry right now, chances are that's what you want. Getting people to pay for a $60 retail property one time doesn't really work for that model, and so you've got to figure out a way to keep paying so long as they keep paying. You can consider a Medici-style patronage system, but that went out of fashion centuries ago. You could consider a subscription service, but that has been going out of fashion for around a decade. A slightly more viable strategy is occasional, large-scale paid content drops, though that retains some of the lack of stability inherent in retail sales. You could also sell micro-transactions, a problematic solution for many reasons but by far the most popular system today. Or you could, like Destiny 2, try to cobble as many of these systems together as possible.
Destiny 2's Curse of Osiris, out earlier this week, is a $20 paid content drop, naturally a part of the "large, paid expansion" concept. It meets the requirements on some levels by adding in new story missions and new locations. But it also gates players out of older systems and generally makes it impossible to continue playing the game without buying the expansion, and with that it feels a little bit like a subscription service: if you want to play Destiny 2 in any genuine way, you sort of have to buy the expansion. But that's old hat. Destiny 2 represented a major push towards making money off of micro-transactions, something which sat at the periphery but didn't really bother me in the original release. With Curse of Osiris, however, I'm starting to feel it creep into the rest of the game and poison my experience.
If you head over to the Destiny subreddit right now, you see an unhappy player community. It is not, as I've said before, totally representative of the player base writ large. But it's a bellwether nonetheless, and it's absolutely seething with rage over Curse of Osiris. Much of that rage is directed at one NPC in particular: Tess Everis, head of the Eververse Trading Company and in-game representative of Bungie and Activision's micro-transaction goals. At Eververse you can buy "Bright Engrams" with real money, and those Bright Engrams contain much of the game's coolest looking equipment, be it ships, shaders, unique armor or emotes.
Eververse is not pay-to-win, even if you can get yourself a few relatively useless blue weapon mods along with your bright engrams. But selling cosmetics occupies a different space in a game like this than it does in a game like Call of Duty or Overwatch. Cosmetics in the original Destiny were a key part of player progression even if they didn't effect gameplay -- I spent dozens of hours questing after that ship from King's Fall not because it would make my player stronger but because I wanted it: it was proof of where I had been and what I had done. When I equipped that creepy glowing shader everyone knew I had gotten it from Crota's End. Destiny has been a collection game from the start, but chasing a big, shiny collection just doesn't feel as rewarding when so many of the elements of that collection are purchased with real money.
That's the real issue here: such a large portion of the rewards for high-end activities have been walled off behind Eververse that it saps my motivation to grab the stuff I can get through normal play. That's badly compounded by the fact that Curse of Osiris has very little new equipment outside of Eververse, and that the only armor set that feels like it really comes with the flavor of the expansion can only be purchased with real money. On top of that, better equipment has a marginal effect on actual gameplay in Destiny 2, and so questing after perfect rolls and complete Raid Sets just doesn't have the same impact that it used to. Cosmetics are pretty much the only reason to get new armor, but you can't really chase that dream without cash.
For me, locking the ships behind Eververse have had the opposite of the intended effect: I just go with the the old, busted ship you get in the campaign because it's the only ship in the game with any connection to my character's story.
I was optimistic about Eververse when it first landed. Bungie mostly used it as a way to sell emotes, which were unavailable through any other sort of play in the original Destiny. Emotes were fun and weird, straddling the line between game and reality: they felt like the perfect deployment of the inevitably fourth wall-breaking micro-transaction system. Things crept forward, however, into all the myriad places where we see them today. And it's begun to really cut into those core gameplay loops of progression and collection that can make the game so satisfying when deployed well. New content should always mean new loot, but I want the $20 I paid at the gate to cover the lion's share of that new loot.
Destiny 2 should just go back to selling emotes for a few dollars a pop. Bungie might find that it makes just as much, if not more money by focusing on selling things that feel like fun extras rather than core gameplay concepts. You might find that you have a whole lot of fans happily playing through their paid content who like the game enough to drop some money on some extra stuff.
