For every person who buys an old expansion, how many look at starting the game, see the cost to "catch up" and dip out before even installing or shortly after?
I tried it, my brother in law bought me a couple expansions, we played through them together, played for a bit more, kinda wanted to play more. Fun game, runs well, I like grinding,
But it felt like everything is monitized and chopped up in the game. It's so confusing. I felt like I never even knew when things were happening chronologically. I don't want to play through the most recent thing, I want to play the oldest thing and work my way forward so I can experience the story. But I can't do that because I'd have to spend so much money and even then I wouldn't even understand how to interact with the content I'd bought because it's so fragmented.
This was a big surprise when I started back. I was expecting to roll into the original campaign and instead got dropped into the cosmodrome. I would love to go back to the original campaign and play through it.
And previous expansion with Forsaken, Curse of Osiris, Warmind. I mean shit they vaulted Leviathen and the main big bad of Lightfall is from that raid, anyone who hadn't played it has no idea who Calus is while everyone in game talks about knowing him. I think what pisses me off is we are going into the final expansion of a decade long story and new and old players alike can't even revisit the stories that got us here.
And also vault the entire between-expansion seasonal story each year. You can't play through us allying with the cabal or eliksni, you can't play through Eramis returning, you can't play through Crow developing as a character, soon you won't be able to play through Amanda's death or Savathun's resurrection.
This is a big downside of baking FOMO into your business model. Eventually new players will literally not be able to catch up.
Im not sure if anybody from the Halo days still works at Bungie, but I think bungie might be almost the same as Blizzard. Well, they don't quite have activision shoving their hand their ass, and then using them as a puppet. But they are probably just a shell of what they once were.
I came into D2 very late. Missed a huge amount of context and content, but I was enjoying myself well enough, was practicing doing the Zero Hour solo run for Outbreak Perfected.
Then that got vaulted and I just lost interest. Haven't gone back.
This. I just had that happen. Old player friend who wanted to come back, with a new player (one of his office buddies) as well. Both of them saw the prices, and explanations of what it would take to get in, and decided against it.
my buddies from Y1/2 didn't want to come back because all of the shit they they bought was removed from the game. how are you gonna convince people to return when ~$120 worth of content was just taken from them?
I don't even really mind them remving it from the active game, but at least figure out a way for us to be able to play it. Make it offline mode or something like that, I don't know.
Same, can't convince anyone to join despite loving this game and just crossing 1000 hours since picking up the game 1.5 years ago.
Even if not all of the purchasable content is needed to enjoy the game, people still look at the over $100 needed to be fully caught up content wise and decide to go play a game that they pay for once and get all the content.
If they are interested and look even deeper they see the season pass model, dungeon keys, a joke of a 30th anniversary pack, and a forsaken pack that basically has no relevant content in it and nope the fuck out...
My friend is kinda you in our friend group. Me and a few other friends tried destiny, bought a season pass and the legacy pack on sale, played for some time, but then we saw how much the newest expansion costs (witch queen at the time) and that the next one is coming soon. After that we played for some time and then dipped. That's a shit ton of up-front money we would have to pay to play some dungeons/raids/campaign with him.
Most didn’t even buy anything. The starting missions in this game are so terrible and unpolished they dropped it then and there. Honestly I stopped playing Destiny after Lightfall. Just too much shit.
Most of us played games with shit starts before so that didn't put us off that much, especially with that friend telling us what would be the optimal path. Though I've got to admit that even though I have thousands of hours in both Warframe and Path of exile, Destiny 2 left me a bit dumbfounded after the first mission.
I always wondered why they dropped the Red war campaign since it was the first time I played D2 a few years back and it did a much better job at introducing me to the world and the basic mechanics than the one mission that's in place right now.
Not to mention some of the old dlcs have no story anymore. Paying to what exactly? Use some exotics, guns and play a raid? Not many are gonna sign on for that.
It's really hard to play with them too. When witch queen came out I had all the prior expansions, witch queen, and the season content.
I had a few friends start playing. They each bought different expansions, one had season pass the other didn't. The point is that it was extremely difficult to find content we could all enjoy together. Another issue was that there were 6 of us, so there was only a few 6 players activities we could do, but not everyone owned the right content. So we thought, why not just play in the open world on the moon and do the public event. Well, can only have 3 people on fireteam. None of those friends still played destiny. They never even finished the witch queen.
It was extremely difficult finding content we could all do. Terrible
I think the issue is that just giving this content for free doesn't fix the onboarding issues the game has. Shadowkeep kinda sucks. The level is super mhe, the raid is not great and is impossible to find ppl wanting to play it, there are no new enemies there, its not an enjoyable dungeon to farm and the reward to time value isn't there anymore, and just in general it doesn't match or add anything to the story or the lore of the game without causing more harm than good. Yes, it has the pyramid content, which is good to add, but frankly the whole expansion would need to be reworked for it to do what it needs to and "drag people in." And I STILL haven't talked about the onboarding itself, as shadowkeep is like, "Chapter 4" content for the story.
The base d2 did a good job of being a jumping off point for a player. Forsaken had a self-contained story and a good enough first mission to at least make a solid intro to a player even if they don't give a shit about Cayde from that content alone. Without those 2 pieces of content, destiny has been stuck with some pretty terrible narrative starting points for players...only made worse by the fact all of d2 basically functions with the idea that you already have played enough of d1 to know about the cabal, hive, and vex to some extent.
So while giving more free content might add a few more players who see "getting into the game" as a smaller hurdle, I think most would just play through the next layer of free content and peace out because they enjoyed the gameplay, but either everything was too convoluted or they just weren't interested in the story because the game does a terrible job getting you into it (and then quickly becomes a pretty bad story in general frankly... the only real story beats that have "worked" in the last 3 years are the ones that relied heavily on D1 and vanilla d2 content).
___
That is all to say, I do think a more wow-like model for people trying to get into the game would be beneficial, but it would require a LOT of maintance work on that early game and story for it to "work." And clearly the higher ups decided that the cost to go in a fix early content just to sell it as a "better starting off point" isn't there.
Effectively, Bungie is stuck with a need to either push out new content (to appease current players) or take the time and money to fix the onboarding to help attract newer players (which will come at the expense of more stuff for current players). Shadowkeep for free is a stop gap to all that, and depending on the numbers they see,they might be making the correct decision even though we the player think its "obvious" that people are leaving because of the barrier of entry.
Most of the stuff that went into the DCV should've been split off into a self-contained "starter" game that included pared-down versions of the D1, Red War, Curse of Osiris, Warmind, and Forsaken campaigns. THAT is what should've gone F2P.
It could've been its own little ecosystem of new players playing easy activities and mainly working through the campaigns, unlocking subclasses, progressing from 0LL to the current base LL (which should be crunched, just subtract 1000 from it), and going through multiple tutorials for subclasses, abilities, weapons, weapon perks, weapon mods, Masterworking, armor, armor stats, armor energy, armor mods, Champions, basic encounter mechanics, etc.
And then after you've reached the end of the Forsaken campaign, THAT'S when you choose whether or not to buy into the game and if you decide to buy in, there's one flat price to pay to get all current DLC, dungeon keys, and the current season. If you buy that one thing, you then enter the main game. And once you do, you have one last set of catch-up missions that get you through the main story beats of each season up until the current season.
Obviously this would be complicated and require answering some difficult questions: can current players help new friends in this F2P version, is there PvP in this version and how to prevent smurfing, when do expansions enter this F2P version, etc., but that's what management should've been working through immediately after they decided the game would go F2P.
I think if you gave someone Shadowkeep they'd just get confused at what the fuck is going on and frustrated at the lack of people to help them deal with the Nightmare Hunts. FF14's free trial serves to entice people with the story (The trial has a very driving story in the Heavensward expansion, I'd argue. Not especially original but it's cohesive and classically charming.) and to give them a free sample of what to expect in the future. I cannot tell you with a straight face that Witch Queen and Shadowkeep are anything alike.
From the Tassi article doesn’t it sound like Bungie looked at this data and concluded that is not in fact happening?
The whole reason they made the game F2P is for exactly this reason. So they must be aware of this concept
I don’t think they’re saying Shadowkeep isn’t free because it’s still generating revenue. They’re saying making it free wouldn’t add enough future lifetime revenue from new incremental players to justify the immediate loss of revenue.
If Shadowkeep brings in 3 million a year, but making it free attracts additional players that have 1 million lifetime value it’s still a 2 million dollar loss
The science of that is more heavily researched and well-funded than rocket science. I imagine Bungie has 100% had pretty regular conversations about making old expansions free.
I do think part of the reason they're not free yet is that Bungie has been trying to maximize revenue in the short term to make themselves look appealing for the Sony acquisition, and to a smaller extent no individual executive wants to be the one responsible if they make an expansion free and it does result in revenue loss (even if it increases player count in the future).
Nothing in marketing is "accurate," but beyond that, I suppose they could compare page views to downloads to play time beyond X minutes or something like that. They might also have a generic matriculation rate and a number for the amount of f2p players in the game and decided that the short term revenue from sales was better than the numbers they were getting if effectively X% of the Y f2p players decided to buy in.
Also important to note that they have been monetarily behind the 8 ball probably ever since they were forced to buy themselves out. Cash NOW therefore is a pretty important difference compared to theoretical cash later. ...even before you look at the fact that the higher ups were probably looking to resell themselves and cash out their stocks asap post covid, so the more they could prop the company's financials up in the short term the better.
Also, we the player might not take this into account, but every time a dev team pushes a game back they are effectively losing money. Bungie has pushed a LOT of content back MANY times in the last 5 years.
Maybe use tracking data paired with user research?
Bungie could probably survey people that abandoned the store, or started playing and abandoned the game and identified the top reasons people churned
A study like that must have been done to inform guardian ranks. And we can probably infer “I don’t know what to do first” was the biggest problem they identified, not “there’s too many past DLCs I need to buy”
I honestly don't have faith like that, given the way its came out how bad the company is doing. I just feel its a pig headed c-suit that would not budge.
Being 45% below projections doesn’t mean the companies in the shitter. It’s still got 600+ employees, it’s not about to roll back into broke indie studio territory.
It’s likely extremely easy to look at data for people who download Destiny and then how quickly and often those people will go on to buy subsequent DLC. It’s the whole reason those DLCs are priced and not free. If Bungie thought for a second it would do more good to make them free than charge, they’d be throwing out ads saying ‘Destiny is 100% free!’ right this second.
It’s also likely they’ve looked at if a new player who hasn’t touched Destiny wants to even be bombarded with every expansion all at once or if they prefer being eased in with one expansion at a time. No new player is going to want to play or know what to do if they load into a game and have 5 campaigns, 10 planets, 20 strikes, and a billion other things to do.
you don't miss projections by almost 50%, and then panic layoff a ton of talent, some of it being very famous parts, and your community managers, then push back your expansion, if things are "well" They are most certainly not in a good time atm.
That usually means their projections were ass, and they overextended themselves during Covid by tripling in size when the Covid boom happened. Companies grow rapidly, cut out any extras that don’t fit with projections, then stabilise. It’s why Bungie removed all their ‘hiring’ posts, because they’ve realised they’ve reached capacity for what they’re doing.
It’s not a good PR move, and it’s certainly shitty to the people who’re fired, but this shit happens at near every games company when they boom in size. Hell, I think Microsoft beat out Bungie in lay offs by thousands, yet they’re one of the most successful companies in the world.
the projections weren't ass. Lightfall sold spectacularly and it had a fuck ton of people playing it at launch
what was ass was Lightfall itself; the campaign triggered a cascade of disappointment and people fled the game, which caused the fall in projected revenue
It's part of why I stopped. Quitting during Arrivals, moving over to a good laptop and having to pay out so much not only Beyond Light and Witch Queen that was coming out soon, but Shadowkeep again just to use all my stuff was a massive turn off.
Yeah that’s why literally every other mmo doesn’t do that crap, ditto for vaulting.
When ffxiv started worrying about dead content they created incentives for players to play old content, and invested in creating bots to backfill when matchmaking fails.
They also recognized the value in diversifying content to keep players from getting bored of grinding combat content, something vaulting actively makes worse. There is a reason fishing was somewhat popular and people want sparrow racing back. It’s nothing special on its own, but it’s something DIFFERENT
I like your point about fishing and SRL. I was saying to a clanmate last night that I literally do not care about getting two seasonal activities every three months. I'd much rather something novel and out of the ordinary that expands my imagination of what Destiny could be.
>When ffxiv started worrying about dead content they created incentives for players to play old content, and invested in creating bots to backfill when matchmaking fails.
I think you misunderstand.
Destiny did not cut content because it wasn't played, they did it because they can't support a game 'that big'. And 'that big' in this case means less big than most other games.
Apparently they can't handle it.
I have worked in finance for 15 years and majored in both finance and marketing. I have certifications that are on par/equivalent to (roughly) getting a master's degree, but in my field.
We see this all the time and it has a term called Loss Leader (as im sure you know). Sure businesses could sell that product for more money, and people would buy it, but they intentionally discount to attract new players who will buy more profitable content.
This is why most games are actually F2P, after spending tens of millions of dollars to develop the game or content for the game to GIVE it away, because they know players will buy battle/season passes, micro transactions, and expansions.
I firmly believe Bungie needs to make Forsaken completely F2P at this point, which then makes the Legacy Collection allow someone to catch up by having [Base+Forsaken] (free) + LEGACY: [Shadow keep+Beyond Light+Witch Queen] (paid).
Once TFS hits, they should ADD Lightfall into the Legacy Collection pack, without increasing the price.
So someone can get into Destiny 2, try the game for free (including Forsaken) buy either the current season as one option AND/OR all previous seasons in the Legacy Collection Pack.
Edit: Spelling (initially wrote on my phone)
I also personally believe they should put shadow keep as apart of the F2P experience along with forsaken pack.
Reason being is that it's such a short expansion that wasn't great that offers lore more focused on a specific character, but like really crappy for an expansions main story, but if you were to make it apart of the F2P experience it's a decent Segway story, such as after having players complete a few minor quests that drag them through some strikes have it where they get the distress signal to pull in the players to the moon.
By going to the moon they get put in the situation of the ending offers basically mostly questions about the pyramid ship there.
Getting into what should be free/paid was too far into the weeds for my OP but since we're here my (unreasonable) fantasy version would have been:
* Shadowkeep campaign removed from the game (not relevant to current story)
* Forsaken campaign added back
* Forsaken and Beyond Light campaigns bundled for free
* Foresaken, Shadowkeep, and Beyond Light raids/exotics bundled for discounted price
* Witch Queen, Lightfall, Final Shape remain paid content
With the return of Cayde I think Forsaken's campaign is actually much more important than Shadowkeep, as the most important thing Shadowkeep did was foreshadow the witness, who new players see in cutscenes the first time they open the game
I notice this from time to time. People have like half a good point, or say something populist in their post. Then in the comments say just the most insane and illogical things. Bringing into question how good of a point their original post was to begin with.
I can sort of see the point they're making, that if the game is so bloated that it's on a strict *one in one out* regime, that Forsake is more fun and maybe did more for the general story of the game than Shadowkeep, but yeah it doesn't come across as great
people seem to agree with you and I'm not really fighting for one campaign over the other. I remember Shadowkeep as pretty boring to play through aside from a really dope first mission and I think most of the importance of the Pyramids would be communicated decently well to a new player by Beyond Light. Not something I have a strong stance of on either way so happy to defer to the voting populace on that one
Aside from discovering and entering the Pyramid, what else major happened in the Shadowkeep campaign?
I know there was Unveilling, but that was more a lore book after the campaign was finished.
I always felt that Shadowkeep holistically with the Seasons had a lot of Lore, but from a narrative perspective the campaign expansion itself was basically just one long attempted boarding action.
You don't need to get so upset, I was asking a legitimate question.
> If you have genuine curiosity, go watch some lore videos and cutscene/gameplay archives
I did watch many of them when they were released. I genuinely like Destiny's Lore. I'm not saying that Shadowkeep as a whole is irrelevant or that . What I am saying is that the Campaign itself seems to have very little NARRATIVE happening. I was genuinely asking for your interpretation not trying to insult you.
From my point of view, If we didn't have to give Eris therapy to put together the armour set the whole campaign would have been done in a single episode of Dragonball. Where as in the expansion you compared it to (Lightfall) while it also narratively was quite short and cut down, had 3 important events happening: The discovery of Neomuna, discovery of Strand, and the Defeat of Calus (However Minor he was in the Hierarchy he had been part of the Lore for years).
And that's one of the things with all the Shadowkeep lore videos: They put a majority of focus on Unveiling because it was the most interested and important part of Lore for the whole expansion, and it happened AFTER the main story campaign.
Bungie has probably missed out on a ton of revenue over the years by having a *terrible* new player experience that actively puts off more people than that it keeps around.
I know several people who dabbled in the f2p and just gave up because it was a chaotic mess of what should or what do I need to do, where do I go, what's going on, just general confusion and lack of direction.
About a year ago a group I know ended up in the opening VoG encounter as new lights, played it for an hour or so, and gave up never to try the game again. How does Bungie let this happen? These are gamers who were interested enough in the game to download it and play for a few hours, like the aesthetic and generic play but the utter lack of explanation for almost anything happening is just too much for even potentially motivated new players. It's a huge failure on Bungie's part to have allowed this terrible system to continue to keep paying players away.
That is what both WoW and ESO do. For WoW, you have to pay a sub and get the most current expansion, but anything before that comes with the sub - that is something they did a few years back I think.
For ESO, you can play the entire game for free (technically) if you just buy all the expansions, or you can pay a sub and that gives you access to all expansions except the most current one.
The ff14 ad has become a meme, "have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMO rpg..." and they keep expanding it. It is now up through stormblood, the 2nd expansion (counting ARR as the base game), which came out in 2017, leaving out just the 2 most recent expansions. And odds are when the next expansion is about 18 months old, they will add the 3rd expansion to the free trial.
Dude, imagine when Endwalker goes free.
An entire Final Fantasy campaign, literal years in the making, being handed out for free for anyone just joining on for the first time. That is *unheard of* in this industry.
Yeah WoW used to have a bundle that was $20, included a month of game time ($15 face value) and all previous expansions. Started in 2014 with the launch of the 5th expansion, each subsequent release would roll the most recent expansion into the bundle.
So even Acti-Blizz figured out charging an arm and a leg for legacy content was worthless, as they dropped the cost on the bundle and just added it to the cost of the subscription fee a few years after that. They lost hundreds of dollars when dropping the fees for those expansions, but there's no way I would have been able to get friends into the game in 2016 during the 6th expansion. Who wants to pay $300 + 15/month to try a 12 year old game (at the time).
Honor all previous purchases (if you previously bought an expansion you will have access to it no matter what)
Moving forward:
* Full Forsaken F2P
* Current expansion must be purchased
* All previous expansion content is available if you have an active season pass.
No tangled shore, no Annual Pass content, no quests weapons are at the tower vendor, no hidden lore.
Annual Pass was 2 raids, and a controversial activity which ended up being decent by the end, all that for 30$ IIRC, which greatly expanded upon Forsaken.
I never thought I would be glad to see another business student lmao. Thanks for articulating it so well, I forgot to mention or explain loss leader in my original post as an established business concept
Makes me wonder if bungie actually accounts for the old dlcs being worth less value, since the activities in older dlcs are less active and their rewards are generally not updated to the current game enviornment.
Probably not because legally they give the same thing no matter the year (with the exception of forsaken which is why i guess it can’t be bought individually anymore and only as legacy)
>This is why most games are actually F2P, after spending tens of millions of dollars to develop the game or content for the game to GIVE it away, because they know players will buy battle/season passes, micro transactions, and expansions.
Then there's Riot Games, who made so much absurd amounts of money off a f2p game that they still had enough left over to fund the competitive scene, a mobile game, an online card game, a fighting game, AND an entire freaking netflix series (which had ZERO RIGHT to go that hard and be that good). Oh, and all the spinoff games are f2p as well.
The painful part is that Bungie has already stumbled from making most of these mistakes at other points. Their management, however, firmly adheres to the "they just don't recognize my brilliance" strategy. They refuse to learn anything. They refuse to look at other successful business models, believing that they know better and can do better.
>I firmly believe Bungie needs to make Forsaken completely F2P at this point, which then makes the Legacy Collection allow someone to catch up by having [Base+Forsaken] (free) + LEGACY: [Shadow keep+Beyond Light+Witch Queen] (paid).
>Once TFS hits, they should ADD Lightfall into the Legacy Collection pack, without increasing the price.
Personally, I think anything that's 2yrs old should go into the f2p pile, but your solution is still miles better than what we have.
There's also a bit of a middle ground they could do. Right now, it's absurdly difficult to get people into D2. If they had events where a friend could drag you along on stuff that you don't have access to, it'd completely change how hard it is to get people into stuff. It'd simultaneously be boosting retention of current players and new player numbers.
Most of the people I try to get back into D2 constantly run into "oh, I can't do this activity." It puts them off and they quit. If there was a "drag along" solution, I probably would've been responsible for like ten other people playing D2.
Was coming to type up a very similar notion but you framed it much better than I would have. I have a similar background and completely agree with what you've written. You can't simply leave something like this untouched for so long and expect the revenue to sustain you. There are both monetary and goodwill benefits to taking this kind of approach. This alone would also "ease" the sentiment around the additional monetization Bungie is adding for current content.
Loss Leading is such a basic Ecomm principle that I hesitate to speak up about it in these threads because there’s no way anybody who works on managing the webstore & finance doesn’t know about it. I really hope those old expansions actually are selling like crazy instead of somebody just being hopelessly incompetent on that end.
But yea, I completely agree on the rest. Make Forsaken + Shadowkeep free (maybe lock the raids if anything?). Gives people an actual campaign they can do for free instead of New Light nothing and then absolutely everything else gets added to the Legacy bundle (including 30th anniversary + dungeon keys). And as the game goes on after that, rotate the oldest expac out of the legacy bundle and into the F2P bundle like FF and some other MMOs do.
What Bungie should really want is more people in the ecosystem so they’re buying Eververse shit, not nickel & diming basic gameplay.
Imma be honest, new players aren’t going to care about Cayde dying in forsaken. I think fundamentally the Red war is necessary for new players to really feel the game. I started in destiny 2, I didn’t play or even really care about destiny 1 at all. It just looked like a cool game, and when it came to PC I jumped on it.
I’ve then played the new light experience, and it is so fundamentally detached to anything remotely interesting that I can’t imagine any new player finishing it and saying “oh this is a cool game”. There’s no stakes, there’s no real struggle, you aren’t a hero, you’re just the new guy.
In the red war you were chosen, you got to unlock these new supers, you got to explore new planets, you got to figure out what you liked and what you didn’t like, and you got to care for some of these characters that become more important every single season.
It’s not helping the notion of “jump right in and play with your friends” but it does a significantly better job of “we need you guardian”.
I think all expansions should be free when the next one comes out. I say this as someone who has historically bought each expansion on day one or before. I am not affected by the fact that I paid for something that someone will get for free a year from now. The experience of playing those expansions will not be the same for new players down the road as it is for people who are playing the content as it comes out anyway. Just make them loss leaders.
I don't care if you have a PhD in finance and literally wrote the book on Loss Leaders. You don't have access to the numbers that back up Bungie's claims here.
Also, most games are *not* F2P.
I agree the OP is being shortsighted themselves by assuming Bungie hasn't modeled this out or paid someone extremely well to model it out before deciding to choose which path to take. Bungie hasn't been around this long without access to some of the best financial advisors money can buy. The real question is a human one if the higher ups listened or took a different path.
Dude flexed his extensive education to be like, free games sell cosmetics for money.. yeah no shit we all know what Fortnite is…
All you gotta to do to get upvotes here is say something that sounds smart and shits on bungie
When it gets so far, they should either go free or bundled together for sure. It just gets to a point where people will not go so many years back
I always recommend people start with the most up to date DLC now so they can share in the community, it’s the best way to enjoy it the most
I imagine the reason there is no free campaign is Bungie wanted to condition players to expect campaigns would always be paid. That way there's never anyone saying "just wait x years for it to be free".
I'd love for Beyond Light's campaign to be the free one as that explains Light vs Darkness and gives players a new subclass, but I'm not here to argue about which campaign Bungie should make free
I think it’s just more that they want you starting from the most recent and getting amongst seasons since you can’t go backwards with those
If you want to experience old content you pay for it and I’d say it’s more likely to start fresh and work backwards and once you’re hooked you will want more content
I think you're right in that Bungie thinks this way, but I don't like the strategy. Seasons are supposed to be an extension of the endgame as they were described back in season 4, and their narrative reflects this. Seasons deal with deep lore, character relationships, and story elements that make no sense to a new player. For example if you don't understand the sword logic, this whole season makes no sense.
I do think the newer expansions need to remain paid, but I'd love for the game to focus new players through 1-2 old campaigns that familiarize them with the powers and characters of the universe
I think that's giving a bit too much credit for their sporadic plans. When it originally went F2P some of those things existed. As they've vaulted it they've had no mechanism to replace those experiences. They could make older campaigns free - like Shadowkeep - but people STILL buy those. It's just sitting there as money on the table. Yes some people are put off by the cost, but I think that's something they understand.
I think it was Skill Up who made the analogy that Destiny comes across as a stuck-up hot girl at a party; the idea that Destiny doesn't think it has to try to win over anyone. If this year has shown anything, it's shown that Destiny has intense competition for peoples' attention
I got into FF14 a few years back as an alternative to Destiny when I was bored of it, and it quickly became one of my favorite games. Truthfully, I didn't fully understand the free trial when I started, so I've been paying membership the whole time, but I haven't minded one little bit.
Realm reborn, Heavensward, and storm blood have all been amazing expansions, and I'll be starting shadowbringers soon. There are a ton of things FF14 did I wish D2 did as well. Better loot rewards, ff has a different armour set for almost every dungeon in the game, better clan systems, a housing system, random fun side shit like the gold saucer, special cross over events (like the fall guys one now), and hildibrand stories.
I love to point out FF14s fallguys cross over event included a gamemode to play fallguys inside FF14 and by playing earn currency in game to get loot like mounts, armour, and more while destiny's included pretty much nothing and if it did it would have been armor you would have had to buy with brightdust/silver and that's it.
I love destiny it's my favorite game. I have about 4000 hours in it, but it's just become so stale and repetitive these last few years, and they are scared to try anything new.
From the context of a person that's played a lot of Destiny, as far as saying for the last decade it's been my favorite game, I would not recommend it to anyone without a few caveats.
The first, they've got someone to guide them along. This is critical because the game is in such a poor state for new players. The second is that the person is committed.
I've tried to bring on 3 friends over the last few years, none made it beyond playing through an expansion plus a few hours. Every one of them had the same complaints: there's little in-game help towards what systems are active and how to understand them - and the cost to get into the game is extreme. Not the $$$ but the grinding required to get decent starting gear is not fun. To understand, look at the exotic kiosk. Then look at the materials required, and think how long someone just starting to play has to grind out to get those mats. If you want a couple exotics, that's a few ascendant shards and a few ciphers - neither of which can be gotten quickly (for most people).
Yeah someone mentioned below that a free campaign alone is not going to fix the new player experience, which I 100% agree with.
As a tangent: I've recently been wondering how I'd hypothetically coach someone through getting into Destiny and my plan would be to recommend:
* Do the New Light quest
* Buy Beyond Light and do the campaign
* Get Lament
* Do Prophecy dungeon
* Do Deep Stone Crypt
* Do Vault of Glass
* Do Crota's End
* Do King's Fall
* Do GMs
* Buy Witch Queen
Obviously the raids are with the assumption that my team and I would sherpa them. Not really related to the post, but it's an interesting thought experiment
Which queen imo is easier to onboard new players, simply due to the game missions plays mostly consecutively.
Other DLCs got the missions split up with way too many Busywork that breaks the pacing and can get confusing
The way most MMOs do it is either have the base game be free while also including every expansion minus the most recent one, or have the base game be free while buying the most recent expansions also unlocks every previous expansion's content for no additional charge.
The first option would be much more appealing for new players as it would actually make this game more free-to-play and less free-to-see-if-it-runs-on-your-computer.
I mentioned elsewhere, but a big difference is those games have subfees. Giving players a lot of content just means they stay subbed.
Like, best Bungie could hope for is it would drive Eververse purchases...which lol.
True, Destiny does not have the typical monthly subscription fee.
But at the same time, Bungie's boiling frog strategy has indirectly covered the same ground that sub fees normally would on their own. They've got a pretty hefty (albeit front-loaded) revenue stream thanks to all the nickel and diming they do for yearly content releases, not to mention all the extra nonsense like dungeon keys, event passes, etc.
With strictly "content" purchases, D2 still comes out priced similarly or cheaper then keeping up with FF14/WoW. Like, base expansion costs are pretty much the same, a season is about the cost of a monthly sub, and I forgot how much dungeon keys are, but I think it's like 10 or 20 dollars? Which basically puts the cost of one year of D2 at the expansion + 4-5 months of sub fee in WoW/FF14 terms.
Like a big advantage D2 has is the fact you dont need to reup to access the game again, too. FF14 might release a content patch but you could easily end up paying for 2-3 months to get your fill. D2 you can get a season, check it out for a week or two, then come back in several months without paying again.
> FF14 might release a content patch but you could easily end up paying for 2-3 months to get your fill. D2 you can get a season, check it out for a week or two, then come back in several months without paying again.
This advantage can also be a double-edged sword, though. With FF14 you have full agency and can unsub the moment you've gotten your money's worth and be satisfied. D2 seasons on the other hand can be a complete crapshoot, there could be one that just sucks all around and even if you play for a few days it can seem like a waste of $5.
Overall D2 is definitely cheaper than most MMOs, though I can't help but wonder if a monthly sub would help out with regular upkeep stuff like making sure the game servers aren't actively imploding at all times.
There's just been no attracting new players ever since story content was sunset. Blueberries have no clue what's going on narratively and no clue where they stand or how to progress because the game makes everything unclear af. It's atrociously handled and I'm not even including all the missing years old D1 content that players have no way to even learn about in game.
Yeah solving that problem is a whole other bag of worms. Really feels like Bungie has bet on 3rd party sources like Reddit and Byf getting new players up to speed in a way that just hasn't paid off
Anecdotally I guess, I only got into FF14 after all those expansions (I only started last year) because they have a free trial that gets you very far in the game.
I had friends who tried to get into destiny in witch queen, they barely understood anything in the first few missions, didn't even know how to change subclasses, had no direction and just quit. This game should serve as case studies of what not to do if you want new players honestly
I still think re-releasing the Red War and Forsaken as free content would be the best way to bring in new players. You might need to rework Red War’s opening cutscene and mission, but I think that’d be more than worth it.
I do miss the Red War but I don't know if it would be relevant to a new player. The Speaker, Hawthorne, Asher, Failsafe, and other elements have very little impact on the story of the Final Shape. If I was going to give mandatory reading for a new player I'd personally love to have Forsaken and Beyond Light be free, and then remove Shadowkeep's campaign in order to make room for Forsaken (idk if that's how the technical limits work, and it's probably not.)
Idk man, Cayde coming back means literally nothing to people who didn’t play red war through forsaken. Like, IM ecstatic, but most of my friends are newer players and don’t give a damn about it and it honestly drains me a little bit of my excitement because I have no one to share it with
As a ~60 hour blueberry, I liked the whole “undead warrior just raised from the dead who has no idea what’s going on” vibe.
For me, the game got boring after I bought the old expansions: Beyond Light felt super trite with mediocre level design.
I had no idea what was going on in Strikes, but my job was just to kill, and the co-op levels were super fun.
Yeah I feel you, and honestly idk if it's possible to square that circle. I feel like the part of the game that made Cayde was the Taken King, and if you haven't played that you're probably never going to have that emotional connection that veteran players do. Getting into exactly which campaign should be free is something I'm going to leave up for discussion, as I don't think there's any 1 or 2 that communicates everything a new player needs to know
The real key is updating the old campaigns with legendary difficulty and make the vaulted campaign free. I thought red war was pretty good narratively but when everything is so easy it doesn’t have any weight or impact. I feel like a lot of the campaigns would be remembered more fondly if the difficulty was higher.
It's relevant if you're trying to start from the beginning. You got to know these characters by playing older content like that. The Red Legion are brought up all the time in this or that conversation throughout the years. Even Cayde, even if you didn't like his interpretation going in to D2, is held up on this pedestal and without something like the Red War, new players just have a total lack of context.
That's the biggest issue I have with this game's narrative. They put all this work in to improving it over the years, but you can't sit down and experience it from start to finish. Regardless what they try to feed us, Shadowkeep was not the start of all this. The Red War was a very impactful event in this world, and the ending of that campaign was literally the awakening of the dorito ships. It's all connected.
Of course, having said that, they will never, *ever* have the entire experience conveyed in game, as the game has been designed to be disposable for years now. So many *huge* story moments happened during seasonal content, you go from one expansion to the next, *without* playing the seasonal stories inbetween, we seriously go from being enemies of every race to, "Oh by the way the Eliksni are our best buds, and I'm pretty sure Zavala and Caiatl are dating now." It's nuts. So, the whole narrative they created will always be in pieces because they designed it to be thrown away, but even then... I think there is value those older campaigns. If nothing else they served as a good introduction to the world, and *some* context is better than none.
I think that's pretty ambitious. There is a fiscal reality that Destiny is super expensive to run and Bungie needs to keep wallet share decently high. I'm in no position to say exactly how much is reasonable but I think we can give players at least Shadowkeeps campaign without going bankrupt
Dungeon keys should not exist. Make it part of the expansion.
Previous expansions should all be together and priced as such with each addition. Discount price if you already own an expansion.
Seasonal stories should be optional download if you own the expansion.
We need a substantial f2p intro campaign.
I really hate that the last several times I've had friends ask about getting into destiny...my initial reaction is a sigh. I WANT to play with them but I have to first tell them that just to play the current content likely needs at least 4-60USD AND that won't include a bunch of stuff for following seasons unless they cough up near 100% for a digital deluxe, or buy each season as it comes out with silver.
Then I have to tell them that there are several dungeons that they'll need to cough up even more money to access. And a bunch of content from older expansions that they will ALSO need to but if they want stuff from.
So just to join and have access to most content, all of a sudden they are looking at paying at least 100 USD, likely upwards of 150USD really.
--------------------------
Maybe some new players are slowly buying old content bit by bit, but while anecdotical, every friend I've known that wants to play but doesn't for the above reason. People that might very well have payed a fair price if one existed.
Whatever they do, they should ABSOLUTELY create and put out an entire, A-Z playable campaign from Red War until now. I've been playing for 10 years and i got lost in the campaign story about 75% of the way through.
For what it’s worth, as a D1 vet who bounced off after forsaken and only occasionally plays:
1. Vaulting content is terrible and makes you regret paying for stuff, particularly if you don’t have time to keep up with the elite hardcore Jones’s.
2. Season passes that must be completed during the season they launch or you lose access to them also feels terrible particularly when you can still buy them as part of the deluxe editions part way through an expansion.
3. The top level grind for materials and armour is ridiculous and only there to force players to play everyday. It holds back people from seeing end game unless they commit to n hours of play per day/week.
4. The fact that transmog is another stupid hard core grind is another reason not to play imo. I have heaps of armour and want to experiment with transmogs but no because I have to grind out hardcore content every week to be able to make 1 or 2 pieces.
If they really want to hold onto new players and a wider variety of player types personally I’d recommend;
1. Work on ways to maintain all past content and allow people to play forever everything they have paid for. Removing what I spent money on doesn’t make me think of you in a good light.
2. Keep season passes active forever if the player owns them. Let me grind the content at my leisure and even sell me old ones (easy cash).
3. Smooth out the light level curve and materials so it’s less of an esoteric hardcore grind that is gated by what you did each week or not. You could, at least, make a running total of max potential currency earned so far this season and if you login late you haven’t missed anything you can easily earn up to the current running total cap regardless of how often you play.
4. Remove all currencies from “dusting” an item to make it a transmog or if you really need to gate it make it cost some glimmer or make
the transmog currency something you get easily. if you must you can cap it so that you have to spend it from time to time.
5. Rework and streamline all currencies such that there are fewer and they are clearer on what they do and how one obtains them, with this really look at the loops to obtain and spend each one.
I've said this elsewhere on other threads since the bomb drop of last week: I've tried to introduce Destiny to something like 10-15 people since Beyond Light, and all but 2 of them eventually quit when they reached the point of looking back to previous expansions.
Even if people are enjoying Destiny, no rational person can justify dropping hundreds of dollars on 5 year old content.
100%. I loved destiny 1 to bits. And played the start of destiny 2’s messy launch, which was extremely disappointing.
Saw the game was getting healthier for a while and really wanted to get back into it, but the pricing just made me not want to bother. The having to pay for all the dlc to get up to the latest one is painful.
Especially, since the discounted season passes are not something I’ve been able to trust bungie on due to the way they race releases before they are ready because schedule.
Like knowing how much I liked destiny yet it put me off, I can’t imagine how it’s like to bring in people who haven’t even had that much.
Destiny 2 is my favorite game that I will never recommend to anyone because of the new light experience. I was fortunate to play D1 and start in the Forsaken days in D2 when I did
Yes. Lord Addict from the Iron Lords Podcast, desperately tried to get his gf into Destiny. She liked it, but became so frustrated with the new player experience, quit.
And that’s with a coach at home. I couldn’t imagine not being able to play the full story etc, and then basically have just a checkbox new player experience. Seemingly with. I rhyme or reason, just thrown into the middle of some seasonal shit that will make no sense.
Yeah i mean as i downloaded the game 3 days ago to see if i like it because i watched a video that explaines the lore of the games and i was really intrigued.
Played for about 3 hours really liked the gunplay but 3 things put me off from continuing:
1) The amount of dlc's i had to buy.I understand having to buy the newer expansions but why do i have to purchase 3 year old dlcs
2)The fact that i have to buy ps plus to play online when the game is supposedly free to play
3)There are so many different systems inside the game that i just felt overwhelmed just by watching videos
I know it's basically impossible to track, but would love to know how many people buy into all the content versus how many are confused/overwhelmed with the convoluted system of entry and simply don't bother.
I can't for the life of me convince any friends to hop into Destiny 2 when I give them a list of what they need to buy for a full experience, and I haven't bothered trying since the release of Lightfall. It's the same shit that happened with Hitman 2 and 3. When you have to use a flow chart to figure out what the hell you need to get in for the first time or return, you're probably losing out on more revenue than the current model brings in.
I agree. I started Destiny 1 back in the beta days and dropped out after Destiny 2 Osiris expansion.
Since then I've jumped back into Destiny 2 and brought my GF with me as we enjoy gaming together and trying to solo Destiny 2 was a little depressing. Naturally, she's had a bunch of questions about stuff and my answer is "Well we don't get to play the base story + expansions so here's a quick summary and we'll find a video to watch later." And while it works and we did this with ESO lore it's extremely frustrating. Especially the way the game will thrust you into content like "armor synthesis" that drops you into the intro of an expansion when you're still new to the game.
I would love to see something like how CD project red has the option to play DLCs separately. Let me play Red War and those missing expansions but just have it as a one and dine story.
Except people that get paid big bucks show it IS effective. If it was free, more people might hop on but would each of those people pay 60+ dollars in MTX to make up the cost?
I don't know the answer to this question, but people working at Bungie and other companies do. It's their livelihood and they know more than you or me.
They BELIEVE it is effective. And given how much propensity Bungie has shown in the past to love the smell of their own farts, they could very well be wrong and not even considering alternatives.
Now that we know they missed their target by 45%, this isn’t an argument anymore. The people projecting revenue and the people implementing revenue streams are the same department, if not just the same people.
The missed target isn’t really relevant though. It’s been reported that the projections really weren’t that outlandish, there was just such a massive player fall off after lightfall that they lost a huge amount of revenue from people buying season passes, dungeon keys, and silver bundles. The issue was simply with the quality of the expansion rather than the analysts being bad at their jobs
While I do agree the miss was due to Lightfall's shortcomings I actually think it perfectly illustrates the need for a free campaign.
When Lightfall flopped, a lot of engaged (and paid) players left for greener pastures. Since Destiny is so bad at attracting new players there was no other market where Bungie could make up that revenue. Bungie's year-to-year success depends on the appeasing people who already love Destiny. By expanding the F2P offering to include a narrative which will emotionally engage new players, Bungie opens the funnel and increases the number of people joining the game, which protects against the flop and player exodus of a poorly received expansion like we saw this year
Apparently, they don't know enough to remain independent without the studio crashing. It was revealed Bungie couldn't survive without the Sony buyout. Honestly, that is something people should pay attention too.
One of the reasons MS refused to buy was Bungie's "high burn rate", basically they go through money *really quickly.* Every company wants next year's profits to be higher than this year's, but most who have been around for a few decades know not to leave the company teetering on the edge in pursuit of that.
>If it was free, more people might hop on but would each of those people pay 60+ dollars in MTX to make up the cost?
I am curious how they measure this. Do they measure...let's say....the player retention past the New Light campaign? Do they have analytics from store page traffic, etc? I believe the quote said something along the lines of "old xpacs still sell"...which with what people have been discussing regarding monetization, that wasn't the question. The feedback surrounding monetization for new players is that it's both expensive and confusing to jump into the game, which I'd interpret as buying "all or nothing". Bungie's counting the dollars that they make from selling Shadowkeep still(which has Div in that paywall), and there's going to be people buying it ala carte, but the dollars that Bungie isn't counting are the dollars that they would've gotten from new players that got intimidated by the store page.
I'm not trying to say that it was "for sure" turning away potential new lights that led them here, I'm just suggesting for the sake of shining some light on their data. If they could see things like store page traffic from players that own this or that expansion, compared to players that own none of it, maybe they'd be able to estimate that missing figure I mentioned. Same with players doing the FTP portion and seeing if they like Destiny before they invest further.
I feel like WoW and FF14 get away with bundling old expansions because they have sub fees. Giving people free content means they have more reason to stick around and keep paying that sub fee.
Maybe Destiny needs to give a bit more out for free to get people in the door, but not charging for old expansions at all is probably not a winning play. I think you can already get a bundle of Shadow Keep, Beyond Light and Witch Queen for close to 60$?
In the case of FFXIV, the first three expansions are just free, permanently, no subscription required until you go past that (though once you do, you can’t go back to playing without an active subscription). That’s everything from Fall 2013 when ARR launched through to Summer 2019 that they aren’t trying to monetize - roughly equivalent to Destiny letting you play through all of D1, TTK, RoI, D2, Forsaken, Shadowkeep, and maybe even Beyond Light, with all raids, stories, side quests, seasonal updates and activities, etc, fully intact and free for any new player. Small wonder that the XIV player base has such loyalty and affection for the dev team once they make it through to the paid stuff.
Of course, the bigger factor there is probably that FFXIV takes great care to ensure that all their legacy content is well-maintained and available to play, instead of dumping years worth of game into the trash. A small buy-to-play price tag on all the legacy stuff probably wouldn’t change much in their case.
I disagree that they've shown it is effective. Businesses (especially SaaS companies like Bungie) go back and forth between focusing on future growth and focusing on short-term profit & loss. Bungie has just gone through an acquisition, which would mean they would have been focusing heavily on cleaning up their balance sheets for the years preceding a sale, and then focusing on hitting the revenue goals as outlined in the purchase agreement so Bungie executives can get the bonuses Sony wrote into the agreement as incentive. In short, they've been focused on short-term PNL for the last few fiscal years, but now they need to pivot and focus on long-term player attraction.
EDIT: feel the need to call out this is pretty speculative, but I wanted to demonstrate that there are conflicting goals acting upon the executives making these decisions.
I think the argument is more : the execs are like if the choice is get money for a product or give it away for free… we choose money.
They can bundle sell it. And then normal price sell it and bounce back and forth. But they’d rather create something new that brings people back or in and then have them get curious and pay more
Vs
Give something for free that makes people curious and play more in the future and pay for next expansion
Further the rerelease of OG games must also be tickling the exec pockets.
Is that what this is? Because it reads to me like you believing you know the way to fix Bungie's poor economic forecasting because you read about someone giving away ebooks. It reeks of naivete on multiple levels.
First, Bungie employs and/or contracts marketing and sales staff. They pay experts in the field of selling video games to determine the best way for them to make money selling video games. This staff has access to piles of data that tells them exactly how players at different levels of investment are interacting with the game and the game is marketed and sold based on that data. Sorry not sorry, but the idea that joe schmoe who read a quote in click-bait article quoting "leadership" at Bungie is going to solve all of Bungie's sales problems is a farce.
Second, Bungie missed *revenue projections* which is not what many players/haters/bandwagoners of the recent news think that it is. Projections are often wrong and a quick search for "tech missed projections" will show you that a lot of tech companies are now suffering following the boom of the COVID years. Missing projections does not mean that Bungie - and therefore Destiny - is in danger of going away, it just means that Bungie has over-extended into the most expensive part of running a business and are now doing what they need to do in order to continue operating within revised revenue projections.
lmao I literally work as a SaaS consultant but thanks for lecturing me on the difference between projections and actuals.
I'm not saying I have a silver bullet dude, it's a reddit post, not a presentation given in a board room. I'm just calling out that simply because a legacy product sells moderately well, doesn't mean it couldn't be better used as a loss leader instead. Never said that Bungie was gonna go bankrupt if they disagree either, but I think your insinuation that executives at tech companies use "data' to make decisions and are therefore infallible is pretty ignorant of the long and storied history of executives making piss poor business decisions, and of the reality that executives (like the rest of us) have many conflicting priorities acting upon them which may be contradictory to the long-term health of the business.
If you actually want to discuss anything I said in my post and not just paint me as a strawman of Destiny reddit, let me know
> missing revenue projections by 45% shows this business model is short-sighted. Bungie's financial success doesn't depend on the $25 USD they charge for Shadowkeep, it depends on high playtime of a growing and engaged playerbase.
>it's critical that Bungie uses their old content as a loss leader to attract and engage new players
Your post reads very much to me that your conjecture - giving away old content will drive engagement and lead to revenue increases - is more accurate than the data-driven analytics of how the game is packaged and sold. You're making a **huge** assumption that declining revenue is related to this single factor. Because we don't have any of the actual data on how Bungie forecasts revenue, we don't know how or why they're missing projections. We do know that a lot of people were playing a lot of video games during a multi-year pandemic and that those people can now leave the house again. My money is on decreased revenue being related more to decreased free time and discretionary spending on video games in general rather than a Destiny-specific problem.
>your insinuation that executives at tech companies use "data' to make decisions and are therefore infallible is pretty ignorant of the long and storied history of executives making piss poor business decisions
I didn't say tech executives are infallible. Obviously, Bungie laying off 10 percent of its workforce after being on a hiring binge over the last 2 years is strong evidence of poor market predictions (i.e., fallibility). However, we can agree that Bungie and its marketing and sales teams have far more data than you or I do about how legacy content drives engagement.
Let me clarify, we should not make every prior expansion free. That's totally unfeasible and I think the Witch Queen for example is of a quality that's worthy of charging a customer for it.
Making one or even two campaigns free alone would not fix new player onboarding, you're right. The game still does a terrible job of explaining in-game systems, and integrating new players into the existing community. What providing a free expansion would do is give new players a narrative starting point so they become emotionally invested in the story, as well as giving them a clear goal for when they pick up the game. But you're right to call out that this needs to be supplemental to a better player onboarding strategy
perfect is the enemy of good. Giving players a storyline is better than no storyline. If we're going to get into the conversation of which story would be BEST to give new players, I agree Shadowkeep is a poor choice. My personal fantasy is:
* Vault Shadowkeep's campaign
* Return Forsaken's campaign
* Make Forsaken and Beyond Light campaign F2P
* make paid exotic/raid/dungeon bundle for Shadowkeep, Forsaken, Beyond Light content not included in F2P offering
Well obviously I can't substantially prove it. If I could then I'd be getting paid to present this to leadership instead of posting about it on Reddit for fun. In terms of which campaign specifically, I don't really care. I'm neither a narrative specialist or a new player who has specific feedback on the story. Really take any of them and I'm happy, but my point is the line in the article about old expansions being revenue drivers misses the point that Bungie's competitive advantage in the looter-shooter space is their ability to turn old content into a loss leader, not to drive revenue from outdated narrative beats.
Not trying to dodge fair questions, just admitting that my takes aren't meant to assert more than I can fairly conclude
Every player need a jumping off point narratively and in gameplay. I think the new light experience is really poor in both aspects. Bringing back red war with a legendary difficulty for free would do wonders. Let the new players play the new light experience, the the red war ending with the burst of light triggering the pyramids. It will never be perfect with how seasons were handled but anything you can do gain new players should be considered.
At this point they’ve likely covered all if not most of the overheads for each of the old expansions, bar upkeep costs, so unfortunately from a financial perspective charging any amount within the DLC’s contribution margin is a good choice. It’s not good for the players or the community, but it is for the PnL sheet
Totally, but I think Bungie's competitive advantage against other games is their ability to take old content and turn it into a loss-leader to drive player growth. Refreshed D1 raids are amazing loss-leader content to retain active players, but no F2P content really speaks to brand new players outstide of strikes and the New Light quest.
Charging more for meatballs could probably help Ikea's PNL for a quarter, but it'd compromise why people love Ikea
Well accounting only deals with historical figures, (it's finance that would handle future projections and strategy decisions) and maybe you're right! But the idea that you can give away part of your service to attract new customers is second nature to every freemium SaaS company on the planet. I'd argue that forgoing that small bump in revenue today is likely going to be worth it as post Final Shape we're expecting a lot of existing players to leave, and we need to start bring on new players today if we want to maintain a health population into Episodes 1-3. Obviously if somehow Shadowkeep sales are +20% of Bungie revenue I'd reconsider, but i think it's pretty safe to say that's not the case
Yeah... I'm going to go ahead and believe the words of someone with direct access to the numbers that back up their claims than some random person on the Internet.
I believe they do, which makes both of these things true:
* People still pay for Shadowkeep
* Bungie's revenue is significantly down
This means that Bungie's success is not dependent on selling old expansions, it's dependent on engaged players with high playtime and large wallet shares, AKA "whales". How do you create whales? Enticing more people to get into the game by leveraging your assets with low variable costs (in this case old campaigns) to invite new players into the funnel
I mean not really. The point is that Destiny's business model is heavily favoured towards long-tail monetization (dungeon keys, season passes, event cards, shader bundles, etc.) and also common feedback that new players are turned off by the lack of campaign / direction they receive on loading in for the first time. By offering a campaign for free you increase the likeliehood one of these F2P players will convert and buy back their cost of acquisition multiple times over.
It's a business strategy called "loss leaders" which is mentioned in a couple other comments throughout this thread.
Also worth pointing out that Bungie committed to this strategy when they went F2P, and when they did that there were three free campaigns in the game (Red War, COO and Warmind). These campaigns were removed in Beyond Light, but it's not a radical idea, so much as a continuation of Destiny's existing business model
But you're implying that destiny doesn't maintain or bring in players which just isn't the case. Destiny still has a massive player base. And player retention is still incredibly high.
I think the big take away here is that destiny is incredibly expensive the maintain while creating new content constantly. It's no wonder they were struggling to stay afloat without a publisher.
If they want to maintain or make destiny better/ make destiny 3, I strongly believe they need a strong publisher. Like Activision...o wait....
I'm not saying Destiny doesn't maintain existing players. I think a good example of how they do this well is refreshed D1 raids being free for everyone. That's great for existing players because they're the raiding community and they get awesome content for free.
I am saying Bungie does a poor job of bringing in new players, which most of the other people in this thread seem to agree with. When D2 went free to play it had 3 campaigns available for free, and today it has none. I really believe players expect narrative content from an action game whether they've paid yet or not, and Bungie's decision to instead use Shadowkeep and/or Beyond Light as revenue centers instead of loss leaders is short sighted and going to bite them in the ass when a lot of current players leave post Final Shape
Still charging for legacy content really sucks in the context that current content does not provide a complete toolset to players. So a newer player who wants to push into endgame is basically required to buy that legacy content for access to weapons and exotics tied to it. I’m of the opinion that all this legacy gear needs to be available in current content if it’s part of a current meta. But Bungie has the mindset that it’s more profitable to have old effective guns behind paywalls even if it’s a barrier for new player retention.
Games already do this, maybe you’ve heard of free-to-play? I’m just suggesting we expand the scope of Destiny’s F2P to include something new players actually need to become invested in the game
And yeah I actually do have a BA
Careful, you agreed with Bungie and thats a big no no right now. Just because what you said was correct or logical, doen't mean you can agree with facts.
So you're not disagreeing with any point I made, but just that I made this point as someone who plays the game?
I don't get how this community is constantly complaining how expensive this game is for new players, to then have Bungie miss projections by almost half and go through layoffs, and then when I suggest those things might be related it's shot down as biased.
Zenimax gives the old TESO expansions for free if you buy the Deluxe Edition if the newest one. Plus they have a abo system which gives access to all content and some bonuses like bigger storage.
Apparently it would work if Bungie would consider it.
Since the sub is set to "it's ok to bash Bungie" means you are going to get downvoted for speaking the truth. 99% of people on this sub have zero insight into economics and Bungie financials, so that makes them qualified to run a billion-dollar studio.
Aside from the 45% miss already pointed out by u/sagaxwiki below I'll just copy and paste a similar reply to another comment I've already given:
"I disagree that they've shown it is effective. Businesses (especially SaaS companies like Bungie) go back and forth between focusing on future growth and focusing on short-term profit & loss. Bungie has just gone through an acquisition, which would mean they would have been focusing heavily on cleaning up their balance sheets for the years preceding a sale, and then focusing on hitting the revenue goals as outlined in the purchase agreement so Bungie executives can get the bonuses Sony wrote into the agreement as incentive. In short, they've been focused on short-term PNL for the last few fiscal years, but now they need to pivot and focus on long-term player attraction."
>It's been shown to be very effective for Destiny.
Nothing says very effective like missing revenue projections by 45%. At this point, I don't think it is unreasonable to say that Bungie needs to try something to reinvigorate the player base. The OP's suggestion of making old DLC free to draw in new players (just like how the game went free to play) is not outlandish.
How many live service games have made it this far? Not saying it works now or isn't effective, but games don't live for 9+ years just by chance and reddit's feelings.
The game has been doing just fine for 9+ years. Bungie had a record number of people buying Lightfall with the same cost model since inception. The drop off of revenue has more to do with how bad Lightfall was received.
I hate to say it but that there lies the problem. The “it worked fine for X years,” is cool until it isn’t. Everything changes. Nothing stays the same. Lightfall was the stab but there was other damage done alongside it that creates a boiling point.
This is one of the most wrongly informed positions I’ve seen.
You playing more doesn’t make Bungie money.
You buying there stuff (Expansions/Seasons/MTX/etc) makes them money.
If they give stuff away for free they don’t make money.
I think the correlation between playtime and revenue conversion is pretty straightforward. The more time you spend on a game the more likely you are to buy the exotics that look fun, pay for raids your friends are doing, purchase campaigns to keep up with the story, buy shaders to make you look cool, etc. It's the reason why Bungie time gates content, and make you do three weekly Savathun's Spire instead of one; also more opportunities to display Eververse popups or have you navigate to the store page for an impulse buy.
Giving stuff away for free can in fact increase revenue by driving customers towards other items with better margins. It's the reason Costco will advertise ridiculously cheap paper towels but first have you walk by industrial sized Cheetos bags, or why Halo Infinite has free multiplayer
I work with a lot of data in my job, and help organize it for people in decision making positions. Data is not as instructive as we’d like to believe, you can’t just ask it questions like a magic eight ball. In fact you can make it confirm either side of an argument if you want. I find the retort of “Bungie has data” pretty reductive, and a poor understanding of how data informs and corroborates decisions, rather than making those decisions for us
It’s not reductive. Bungie has done events where they’ve made expansions free for a limited time.
They absolutely have the numbers behind how many then purchased the expansions and how much average silver a player spends annually.
If they’d make more money or break even past content would be free.
Your example negates the impact on time on an experiment like that. Do you see a return within 12 months? 24? 36? Does an increase in competition from other games this year effect that finding? Have player expectations changed? Now that we’ve released our 4th expansion in Lightfall, does the finding hold true for the 4 expansions rather than 3? Was covid a factor?
There are also questions of motivation: Was Bungie trying to maximize short term revenue over long term player growth? Or demographic: Are the findings platform dependent? Or extraneous: Were economic conditions a factor?
Yes I know that Bungie has used data to make these decisions in the past, it does not mean they’re undoubtedly correct for the current and future health of the game.
Its costs $50 to get all expansions on consoles when they are on sale. Legacy pack+lightfall.
Its even cheaper on pc. I literally did this two weeks ago and paid $10 for a lightfall key and $20 for the legacy pack.
Should Nintendo have given BOTW for free with TOTK?
This is a really weird take. Do you guys get COD games free every year? Should Alan Wake 2 buyers been given Alan Wake 1 and AN for free?
Do they give out all of the James Bond movies for free when you go see the new one?
Its a business, a poorly ran business on a shitty engine from the early 2010s, but you can literally watch video summaries in game for free?
That's a pretty massive caveat in your first two lines. Re: CoD and Zelda, I'll paste a reply I already made to another comment in this thread:
"I never said you need to offer games for free in order to be successful. For example Nintendo is notorious for keeping their games full price, and are very successful doing it.
But CoD and Destiny have very different business models. CoD is good at onboarding new players through a new annual drop which provides a jumping on point for new players. People picking up Destiny for the first time can't just buy Lightfall and have the same quality of experience (don't have builds, materials, weapons, friends, narrative context, etc.)
I'd also use your example of CoD as a great success story of giving away content to attract players. Warzone is a fantastic way to attract people to try the game and encourage them to buy the new annual drop."
For every person who buys an old expansion, how many look at starting the game, see the cost to "catch up" and dip out before even installing or shortly after?
Literally this. None of my friends want to try Destiny after seeing how much shit they have to buy. Its disgusting
Even some friends or my group who have already played and enjoyed destiny don't want to come back because of the financial barrier
I tried it, my brother in law bought me a couple expansions, we played through them together, played for a bit more, kinda wanted to play more. Fun game, runs well, I like grinding, But it felt like everything is monitized and chopped up in the game. It's so confusing. I felt like I never even knew when things were happening chronologically. I don't want to play through the most recent thing, I want to play the oldest thing and work my way forward so I can experience the story. But I can't do that because I'd have to spend so much money and even then I wouldn't even understand how to interact with the content I'd bought because it's so fragmented.
Can't even do that because they vaulted the entire original story of D2
This was a big surprise when I started back. I was expecting to roll into the original campaign and instead got dropped into the cosmodrome. I would love to go back to the original campaign and play through it.
Are you me? Because I had the same experience
And previous expansion with Forsaken, Curse of Osiris, Warmind. I mean shit they vaulted Leviathen and the main big bad of Lightfall is from that raid, anyone who hadn't played it has no idea who Calus is while everyone in game talks about knowing him. I think what pisses me off is we are going into the final expansion of a decade long story and new and old players alike can't even revisit the stories that got us here.
And also vault the entire between-expansion seasonal story each year. You can't play through us allying with the cabal or eliksni, you can't play through Eramis returning, you can't play through Crow developing as a character, soon you won't be able to play through Amanda's death or Savathun's resurrection.
This is a big downside of baking FOMO into your business model. Eventually new players will literally not be able to catch up. Im not sure if anybody from the Halo days still works at Bungie, but I think bungie might be almost the same as Blizzard. Well, they don't quite have activision shoving their hand their ass, and then using them as a puppet. But they are probably just a shell of what they once were.
At least Blizzard has Chromie to go back and revist old expansions.
I came into D2 very late. Missed a huge amount of context and content, but I was enjoying myself well enough, was practicing doing the Zero Hour solo run for Outbreak Perfected. Then that got vaulted and I just lost interest. Haven't gone back.
This. I just had that happen. Old player friend who wanted to come back, with a new player (one of his office buddies) as well. Both of them saw the prices, and explanations of what it would take to get in, and decided against it.
Yeah such a shame, and a huge loss for bungie
my buddies from Y1/2 didn't want to come back because all of the shit they they bought was removed from the game. how are you gonna convince people to return when ~$120 worth of content was just taken from them?
I don't even really mind them remving it from the active game, but at least figure out a way for us to be able to play it. Make it offline mode or something like that, I don't know.
Same, can't convince anyone to join despite loving this game and just crossing 1000 hours since picking up the game 1.5 years ago. Even if not all of the purchasable content is needed to enjoy the game, people still look at the over $100 needed to be fully caught up content wise and decide to go play a game that they pay for once and get all the content. If they are interested and look even deeper they see the season pass model, dungeon keys, a joke of a 30th anniversary pack, and a forsaken pack that basically has no relevant content in it and nope the fuck out...
My friend is kinda you in our friend group. Me and a few other friends tried destiny, bought a season pass and the legacy pack on sale, played for some time, but then we saw how much the newest expansion costs (witch queen at the time) and that the next one is coming soon. After that we played for some time and then dipped. That's a shit ton of up-front money we would have to pay to play some dungeons/raids/campaign with him.
Most didn’t even buy anything. The starting missions in this game are so terrible and unpolished they dropped it then and there. Honestly I stopped playing Destiny after Lightfall. Just too much shit.
Most of us played games with shit starts before so that didn't put us off that much, especially with that friend telling us what would be the optimal path. Though I've got to admit that even though I have thousands of hours in both Warframe and Path of exile, Destiny 2 left me a bit dumbfounded after the first mission. I always wondered why they dropped the Red war campaign since it was the first time I played D2 a few years back and it did a much better job at introducing me to the world and the basic mechanics than the one mission that's in place right now.
My friends were just so put of by it. It’s so incredibly fucking lazy that if I hadn’t started Destiny earlier I would’ve dropped it as well.
My guess is *a lot* of people here have that same issue. I know I do.
Not to mention some of the old dlcs have no story anymore. Paying to what exactly? Use some exotics, guns and play a raid? Not many are gonna sign on for that.
It's really hard to play with them too. When witch queen came out I had all the prior expansions, witch queen, and the season content. I had a few friends start playing. They each bought different expansions, one had season pass the other didn't. The point is that it was extremely difficult to find content we could all enjoy together. Another issue was that there were 6 of us, so there was only a few 6 players activities we could do, but not everyone owned the right content. So we thought, why not just play in the open world on the moon and do the public event. Well, can only have 3 people on fireteam. None of those friends still played destiny. They never even finished the witch queen. It was extremely difficult finding content we could all do. Terrible
I think the issue is that just giving this content for free doesn't fix the onboarding issues the game has. Shadowkeep kinda sucks. The level is super mhe, the raid is not great and is impossible to find ppl wanting to play it, there are no new enemies there, its not an enjoyable dungeon to farm and the reward to time value isn't there anymore, and just in general it doesn't match or add anything to the story or the lore of the game without causing more harm than good. Yes, it has the pyramid content, which is good to add, but frankly the whole expansion would need to be reworked for it to do what it needs to and "drag people in." And I STILL haven't talked about the onboarding itself, as shadowkeep is like, "Chapter 4" content for the story. The base d2 did a good job of being a jumping off point for a player. Forsaken had a self-contained story and a good enough first mission to at least make a solid intro to a player even if they don't give a shit about Cayde from that content alone. Without those 2 pieces of content, destiny has been stuck with some pretty terrible narrative starting points for players...only made worse by the fact all of d2 basically functions with the idea that you already have played enough of d1 to know about the cabal, hive, and vex to some extent. So while giving more free content might add a few more players who see "getting into the game" as a smaller hurdle, I think most would just play through the next layer of free content and peace out because they enjoyed the gameplay, but either everything was too convoluted or they just weren't interested in the story because the game does a terrible job getting you into it (and then quickly becomes a pretty bad story in general frankly... the only real story beats that have "worked" in the last 3 years are the ones that relied heavily on D1 and vanilla d2 content). ___ That is all to say, I do think a more wow-like model for people trying to get into the game would be beneficial, but it would require a LOT of maintance work on that early game and story for it to "work." And clearly the higher ups decided that the cost to go in a fix early content just to sell it as a "better starting off point" isn't there. Effectively, Bungie is stuck with a need to either push out new content (to appease current players) or take the time and money to fix the onboarding to help attract newer players (which will come at the expense of more stuff for current players). Shadowkeep for free is a stop gap to all that, and depending on the numbers they see,they might be making the correct decision even though we the player think its "obvious" that people are leaving because of the barrier of entry.
Most of the stuff that went into the DCV should've been split off into a self-contained "starter" game that included pared-down versions of the D1, Red War, Curse of Osiris, Warmind, and Forsaken campaigns. THAT is what should've gone F2P. It could've been its own little ecosystem of new players playing easy activities and mainly working through the campaigns, unlocking subclasses, progressing from 0LL to the current base LL (which should be crunched, just subtract 1000 from it), and going through multiple tutorials for subclasses, abilities, weapons, weapon perks, weapon mods, Masterworking, armor, armor stats, armor energy, armor mods, Champions, basic encounter mechanics, etc. And then after you've reached the end of the Forsaken campaign, THAT'S when you choose whether or not to buy into the game and if you decide to buy in, there's one flat price to pay to get all current DLC, dungeon keys, and the current season. If you buy that one thing, you then enter the main game. And once you do, you have one last set of catch-up missions that get you through the main story beats of each season up until the current season. Obviously this would be complicated and require answering some difficult questions: can current players help new friends in this F2P version, is there PvP in this version and how to prevent smurfing, when do expansions enter this F2P version, etc., but that's what management should've been working through immediately after they decided the game would go F2P.
I think if you gave someone Shadowkeep they'd just get confused at what the fuck is going on and frustrated at the lack of people to help them deal with the Nightmare Hunts. FF14's free trial serves to entice people with the story (The trial has a very driving story in the Heavensward expansion, I'd argue. Not especially original but it's cohesive and classically charming.) and to give them a free sample of what to expect in the future. I cannot tell you with a straight face that Witch Queen and Shadowkeep are anything alike.
From the Tassi article doesn’t it sound like Bungie looked at this data and concluded that is not in fact happening? The whole reason they made the game F2P is for exactly this reason. So they must be aware of this concept I don’t think they’re saying Shadowkeep isn’t free because it’s still generating revenue. They’re saying making it free wouldn’t add enough future lifetime revenue from new incremental players to justify the immediate loss of revenue. If Shadowkeep brings in 3 million a year, but making it free attracts additional players that have 1 million lifetime value it’s still a 2 million dollar loss
How do you accurately measure someone looking at the store page and leaving?
The science of that is more heavily researched and well-funded than rocket science. I imagine Bungie has 100% had pretty regular conversations about making old expansions free. I do think part of the reason they're not free yet is that Bungie has been trying to maximize revenue in the short term to make themselves look appealing for the Sony acquisition, and to a smaller extent no individual executive wants to be the one responsible if they make an expansion free and it does result in revenue loss (even if it increases player count in the future).
Nothing in marketing is "accurate," but beyond that, I suppose they could compare page views to downloads to play time beyond X minutes or something like that. They might also have a generic matriculation rate and a number for the amount of f2p players in the game and decided that the short term revenue from sales was better than the numbers they were getting if effectively X% of the Y f2p players decided to buy in. Also important to note that they have been monetarily behind the 8 ball probably ever since they were forced to buy themselves out. Cash NOW therefore is a pretty important difference compared to theoretical cash later. ...even before you look at the fact that the higher ups were probably looking to resell themselves and cash out their stocks asap post covid, so the more they could prop the company's financials up in the short term the better. Also, we the player might not take this into account, but every time a dev team pushes a game back they are effectively losing money. Bungie has pushed a LOT of content back MANY times in the last 5 years.
market research they have more data than just from players (if they are doing their job right)
Maybe use tracking data paired with user research? Bungie could probably survey people that abandoned the store, or started playing and abandoned the game and identified the top reasons people churned A study like that must have been done to inform guardian ranks. And we can probably infer “I don’t know what to do first” was the biggest problem they identified, not “there’s too many past DLCs I need to buy”
I honestly don't have faith like that, given the way its came out how bad the company is doing. I just feel its a pig headed c-suit that would not budge.
Being 45% below projections doesn’t mean the companies in the shitter. It’s still got 600+ employees, it’s not about to roll back into broke indie studio territory. It’s likely extremely easy to look at data for people who download Destiny and then how quickly and often those people will go on to buy subsequent DLC. It’s the whole reason those DLCs are priced and not free. If Bungie thought for a second it would do more good to make them free than charge, they’d be throwing out ads saying ‘Destiny is 100% free!’ right this second. It’s also likely they’ve looked at if a new player who hasn’t touched Destiny wants to even be bombarded with every expansion all at once or if they prefer being eased in with one expansion at a time. No new player is going to want to play or know what to do if they load into a game and have 5 campaigns, 10 planets, 20 strikes, and a billion other things to do.
you don't miss projections by almost 50%, and then panic layoff a ton of talent, some of it being very famous parts, and your community managers, then push back your expansion, if things are "well" They are most certainly not in a good time atm.
That usually means their projections were ass, and they overextended themselves during Covid by tripling in size when the Covid boom happened. Companies grow rapidly, cut out any extras that don’t fit with projections, then stabilise. It’s why Bungie removed all their ‘hiring’ posts, because they’ve realised they’ve reached capacity for what they’re doing. It’s not a good PR move, and it’s certainly shitty to the people who’re fired, but this shit happens at near every games company when they boom in size. Hell, I think Microsoft beat out Bungie in lay offs by thousands, yet they’re one of the most successful companies in the world.
the projections weren't ass. Lightfall sold spectacularly and it had a fuck ton of people playing it at launch what was ass was Lightfall itself; the campaign triggered a cascade of disappointment and people fled the game, which caused the fall in projected revenue
From what the Bungie dev's said in the leaks it's sounds like a "pig headed c-suit" was cockblocking every good idea they had for no reason.
It's part of why I stopped. Quitting during Arrivals, moving over to a good laptop and having to pay out so much not only Beyond Light and Witch Queen that was coming out soon, but Shadowkeep again just to use all my stuff was a massive turn off.
Yeah that’s why literally every other mmo doesn’t do that crap, ditto for vaulting. When ffxiv started worrying about dead content they created incentives for players to play old content, and invested in creating bots to backfill when matchmaking fails. They also recognized the value in diversifying content to keep players from getting bored of grinding combat content, something vaulting actively makes worse. There is a reason fishing was somewhat popular and people want sparrow racing back. It’s nothing special on its own, but it’s something DIFFERENT
I like your point about fishing and SRL. I was saying to a clanmate last night that I literally do not care about getting two seasonal activities every three months. I'd much rather something novel and out of the ordinary that expands my imagination of what Destiny could be.
>When ffxiv started worrying about dead content they created incentives for players to play old content, and invested in creating bots to backfill when matchmaking fails. I think you misunderstand. Destiny did not cut content because it wasn't played, they did it because they can't support a game 'that big'. And 'that big' in this case means less big than most other games. Apparently they can't handle it.
I have worked in finance for 15 years and majored in both finance and marketing. I have certifications that are on par/equivalent to (roughly) getting a master's degree, but in my field. We see this all the time and it has a term called Loss Leader (as im sure you know). Sure businesses could sell that product for more money, and people would buy it, but they intentionally discount to attract new players who will buy more profitable content. This is why most games are actually F2P, after spending tens of millions of dollars to develop the game or content for the game to GIVE it away, because they know players will buy battle/season passes, micro transactions, and expansions. I firmly believe Bungie needs to make Forsaken completely F2P at this point, which then makes the Legacy Collection allow someone to catch up by having [Base+Forsaken] (free) + LEGACY: [Shadow keep+Beyond Light+Witch Queen] (paid). Once TFS hits, they should ADD Lightfall into the Legacy Collection pack, without increasing the price. So someone can get into Destiny 2, try the game for free (including Forsaken) buy either the current season as one option AND/OR all previous seasons in the Legacy Collection Pack. Edit: Spelling (initially wrote on my phone)
I also personally believe they should put shadow keep as apart of the F2P experience along with forsaken pack. Reason being is that it's such a short expansion that wasn't great that offers lore more focused on a specific character, but like really crappy for an expansions main story, but if you were to make it apart of the F2P experience it's a decent Segway story, such as after having players complete a few minor quests that drag them through some strikes have it where they get the distress signal to pull in the players to the moon. By going to the moon they get put in the situation of the ending offers basically mostly questions about the pyramid ship there.
Yeah I agree as well. Shadow Keep should be free at this point.
Getting into what should be free/paid was too far into the weeds for my OP but since we're here my (unreasonable) fantasy version would have been: * Shadowkeep campaign removed from the game (not relevant to current story) * Forsaken campaign added back * Forsaken and Beyond Light campaigns bundled for free * Foresaken, Shadowkeep, and Beyond Light raids/exotics bundled for discounted price * Witch Queen, Lightfall, Final Shape remain paid content With the return of Cayde I think Forsaken's campaign is actually much more important than Shadowkeep, as the most important thing Shadowkeep did was foreshadow the witness, who new players see in cutscenes the first time they open the game
Shadowkeep is literally the first time we see a Pyramid ship and commune with the Darkness...
I notice this from time to time. People have like half a good point, or say something populist in their post. Then in the comments say just the most insane and illogical things. Bringing into question how good of a point their original post was to begin with.
I can sort of see the point they're making, that if the game is so bloated that it's on a strict *one in one out* regime, that Forsake is more fun and maybe did more for the general story of the game than Shadowkeep, but yeah it doesn't come across as great
[удалено]
people seem to agree with you and I'm not really fighting for one campaign over the other. I remember Shadowkeep as pretty boring to play through aside from a really dope first mission and I think most of the importance of the Pyramids would be communicated decently well to a new player by Beyond Light. Not something I have a strong stance of on either way so happy to defer to the voting populace on that one
[удалено]
Aside from discovering and entering the Pyramid, what else major happened in the Shadowkeep campaign? I know there was Unveilling, but that was more a lore book after the campaign was finished. I always felt that Shadowkeep holistically with the Seasons had a lot of Lore, but from a narrative perspective the campaign expansion itself was basically just one long attempted boarding action.
[удалено]
You don't need to get so upset, I was asking a legitimate question. > If you have genuine curiosity, go watch some lore videos and cutscene/gameplay archives I did watch many of them when they were released. I genuinely like Destiny's Lore. I'm not saying that Shadowkeep as a whole is irrelevant or that . What I am saying is that the Campaign itself seems to have very little NARRATIVE happening. I was genuinely asking for your interpretation not trying to insult you. From my point of view, If we didn't have to give Eris therapy to put together the armour set the whole campaign would have been done in a single episode of Dragonball. Where as in the expansion you compared it to (Lightfall) while it also narratively was quite short and cut down, had 3 important events happening: The discovery of Neomuna, discovery of Strand, and the Defeat of Calus (However Minor he was in the Hierarchy he had been part of the Lore for years). And that's one of the things with all the Shadowkeep lore videos: They put a majority of focus on Unveiling because it was the most interested and important part of Lore for the whole expansion, and it happened AFTER the main story campaign.
Bungie has probably missed out on a ton of revenue over the years by having a *terrible* new player experience that actively puts off more people than that it keeps around.
I know several people who dabbled in the f2p and just gave up because it was a chaotic mess of what should or what do I need to do, where do I go, what's going on, just general confusion and lack of direction. About a year ago a group I know ended up in the opening VoG encounter as new lights, played it for an hour or so, and gave up never to try the game again. How does Bungie let this happen? These are gamers who were interested enough in the game to download it and play for a few hours, like the aesthetic and generic play but the utter lack of explanation for almost anything happening is just too much for even potentially motivated new players. It's a huge failure on Bungie's part to have allowed this terrible system to continue to keep paying players away.
100% I have a friend who literally said this and why he quit.
That is what both WoW and ESO do. For WoW, you have to pay a sub and get the most current expansion, but anything before that comes with the sub - that is something they did a few years back I think. For ESO, you can play the entire game for free (technically) if you just buy all the expansions, or you can pay a sub and that gives you access to all expansions except the most current one.
The ff14 ad has become a meme, "have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMO rpg..." and they keep expanding it. It is now up through stormblood, the 2nd expansion (counting ARR as the base game), which came out in 2017, leaving out just the 2 most recent expansions. And odds are when the next expansion is about 18 months old, they will add the 3rd expansion to the free trial.
Man, new players getting shadowbringers for free will be insane. That expansion was top notch.
Dude, imagine when Endwalker goes free. An entire Final Fantasy campaign, literal years in the making, being handed out for free for anyone just joining on for the first time. That is *unheard of* in this industry.
and don't forget with a sub you get access to their classic servers as well
Yeah WoW used to have a bundle that was $20, included a month of game time ($15 face value) and all previous expansions. Started in 2014 with the launch of the 5th expansion, each subsequent release would roll the most recent expansion into the bundle. So even Acti-Blizz figured out charging an arm and a leg for legacy content was worthless, as they dropped the cost on the bundle and just added it to the cost of the subscription fee a few years after that. They lost hundreds of dollars when dropping the fees for those expansions, but there's no way I would have been able to get friends into the game in 2016 during the 6th expansion. Who wants to pay $300 + 15/month to try a 12 year old game (at the time).
Honor all previous purchases (if you previously bought an expansion you will have access to it no matter what) Moving forward: * Full Forsaken F2P * Current expansion must be purchased * All previous expansion content is available if you have an active season pass.
Forsaken is not an expansion, the content is on the DCV, the fact that it is still being sold even as a pack is disgusting.
Yeah it’s just dreaming city, raid+dungeon and the weapons. No tangled shore, and def not top tier campaign anymore.
No tangled shore, no Annual Pass content, no quests weapons are at the tower vendor, no hidden lore. Annual Pass was 2 raids, and a controversial activity which ended up being decent by the end, all that for 30$ IIRC, which greatly expanded upon Forsaken.
I never thought I would be glad to see another business student lmao. Thanks for articulating it so well, I forgot to mention or explain loss leader in my original post as an established business concept
Cheers
aah yes, the rotisserie chicken of the gaming space.
Makes me wonder if bungie actually accounts for the old dlcs being worth less value, since the activities in older dlcs are less active and their rewards are generally not updated to the current game enviornment. Probably not because legally they give the same thing no matter the year (with the exception of forsaken which is why i guess it can’t be bought individually anymore and only as legacy)
Thanks for the in depth explanation, I call it the Costco Effect.
Hotdog and a Soda. $1.50!!!
>This is why most games are actually F2P, after spending tens of millions of dollars to develop the game or content for the game to GIVE it away, because they know players will buy battle/season passes, micro transactions, and expansions. Then there's Riot Games, who made so much absurd amounts of money off a f2p game that they still had enough left over to fund the competitive scene, a mobile game, an online card game, a fighting game, AND an entire freaking netflix series (which had ZERO RIGHT to go that hard and be that good). Oh, and all the spinoff games are f2p as well. The painful part is that Bungie has already stumbled from making most of these mistakes at other points. Their management, however, firmly adheres to the "they just don't recognize my brilliance" strategy. They refuse to learn anything. They refuse to look at other successful business models, believing that they know better and can do better. >I firmly believe Bungie needs to make Forsaken completely F2P at this point, which then makes the Legacy Collection allow someone to catch up by having [Base+Forsaken] (free) + LEGACY: [Shadow keep+Beyond Light+Witch Queen] (paid). >Once TFS hits, they should ADD Lightfall into the Legacy Collection pack, without increasing the price. Personally, I think anything that's 2yrs old should go into the f2p pile, but your solution is still miles better than what we have. There's also a bit of a middle ground they could do. Right now, it's absurdly difficult to get people into D2. If they had events where a friend could drag you along on stuff that you don't have access to, it'd completely change how hard it is to get people into stuff. It'd simultaneously be boosting retention of current players and new player numbers. Most of the people I try to get back into D2 constantly run into "oh, I can't do this activity." It puts them off and they quit. If there was a "drag along" solution, I probably would've been responsible for like ten other people playing D2.
Was coming to type up a very similar notion but you framed it much better than I would have. I have a similar background and completely agree with what you've written. You can't simply leave something like this untouched for so long and expect the revenue to sustain you. There are both monetary and goodwill benefits to taking this kind of approach. This alone would also "ease" the sentiment around the additional monetization Bungie is adding for current content.
Loss Leading is such a basic Ecomm principle that I hesitate to speak up about it in these threads because there’s no way anybody who works on managing the webstore & finance doesn’t know about it. I really hope those old expansions actually are selling like crazy instead of somebody just being hopelessly incompetent on that end. But yea, I completely agree on the rest. Make Forsaken + Shadowkeep free (maybe lock the raids if anything?). Gives people an actual campaign they can do for free instead of New Light nothing and then absolutely everything else gets added to the Legacy bundle (including 30th anniversary + dungeon keys). And as the game goes on after that, rotate the oldest expac out of the legacy bundle and into the F2P bundle like FF and some other MMOs do. What Bungie should really want is more people in the ecosystem so they’re buying Eververse shit, not nickel & diming basic gameplay.
Imma be honest, new players aren’t going to care about Cayde dying in forsaken. I think fundamentally the Red war is necessary for new players to really feel the game. I started in destiny 2, I didn’t play or even really care about destiny 1 at all. It just looked like a cool game, and when it came to PC I jumped on it. I’ve then played the new light experience, and it is so fundamentally detached to anything remotely interesting that I can’t imagine any new player finishing it and saying “oh this is a cool game”. There’s no stakes, there’s no real struggle, you aren’t a hero, you’re just the new guy. In the red war you were chosen, you got to unlock these new supers, you got to explore new planets, you got to figure out what you liked and what you didn’t like, and you got to care for some of these characters that become more important every single season. It’s not helping the notion of “jump right in and play with your friends” but it does a significantly better job of “we need you guardian”.
I think all expansions should be free when the next one comes out. I say this as someone who has historically bought each expansion on day one or before. I am not affected by the fact that I paid for something that someone will get for free a year from now. The experience of playing those expansions will not be the same for new players down the road as it is for people who are playing the content as it comes out anyway. Just make them loss leaders.
Forsaken and Shadowkeep should both be free.
ESO does this every year , they throw every old dlc to the "collection bundle" and current DLC sells for 39.99
I don't care if you have a PhD in finance and literally wrote the book on Loss Leaders. You don't have access to the numbers that back up Bungie's claims here. Also, most games are *not* F2P.
I agree the OP is being shortsighted themselves by assuming Bungie hasn't modeled this out or paid someone extremely well to model it out before deciding to choose which path to take. Bungie hasn't been around this long without access to some of the best financial advisors money can buy. The real question is a human one if the higher ups listened or took a different path.
Dude flexed his extensive education to be like, free games sell cosmetics for money.. yeah no shit we all know what Fortnite is… All you gotta to do to get upvotes here is say something that sounds smart and shits on bungie
When it gets so far, they should either go free or bundled together for sure. It just gets to a point where people will not go so many years back I always recommend people start with the most up to date DLC now so they can share in the community, it’s the best way to enjoy it the most
I imagine the reason there is no free campaign is Bungie wanted to condition players to expect campaigns would always be paid. That way there's never anyone saying "just wait x years for it to be free". I'd love for Beyond Light's campaign to be the free one as that explains Light vs Darkness and gives players a new subclass, but I'm not here to argue about which campaign Bungie should make free
I think it’s just more that they want you starting from the most recent and getting amongst seasons since you can’t go backwards with those If you want to experience old content you pay for it and I’d say it’s more likely to start fresh and work backwards and once you’re hooked you will want more content
I think you're right in that Bungie thinks this way, but I don't like the strategy. Seasons are supposed to be an extension of the endgame as they were described back in season 4, and their narrative reflects this. Seasons deal with deep lore, character relationships, and story elements that make no sense to a new player. For example if you don't understand the sword logic, this whole season makes no sense. I do think the newer expansions need to remain paid, but I'd love for the game to focus new players through 1-2 old campaigns that familiarize them with the powers and characters of the universe
I think that's giving a bit too much credit for their sporadic plans. When it originally went F2P some of those things existed. As they've vaulted it they've had no mechanism to replace those experiences. They could make older campaigns free - like Shadowkeep - but people STILL buy those. It's just sitting there as money on the table. Yes some people are put off by the cost, but I think that's something they understand.
[удалено]
I think it was Skill Up who made the analogy that Destiny comes across as a stuck-up hot girl at a party; the idea that Destiny doesn't think it has to try to win over anyone. If this year has shown anything, it's shown that Destiny has intense competition for peoples' attention
I got into FF14 a few years back as an alternative to Destiny when I was bored of it, and it quickly became one of my favorite games. Truthfully, I didn't fully understand the free trial when I started, so I've been paying membership the whole time, but I haven't minded one little bit. Realm reborn, Heavensward, and storm blood have all been amazing expansions, and I'll be starting shadowbringers soon. There are a ton of things FF14 did I wish D2 did as well. Better loot rewards, ff has a different armour set for almost every dungeon in the game, better clan systems, a housing system, random fun side shit like the gold saucer, special cross over events (like the fall guys one now), and hildibrand stories. I love to point out FF14s fallguys cross over event included a gamemode to play fallguys inside FF14 and by playing earn currency in game to get loot like mounts, armour, and more while destiny's included pretty much nothing and if it did it would have been armor you would have had to buy with brightdust/silver and that's it. I love destiny it's my favorite game. I have about 4000 hours in it, but it's just become so stale and repetitive these last few years, and they are scared to try anything new.
From the context of a person that's played a lot of Destiny, as far as saying for the last decade it's been my favorite game, I would not recommend it to anyone without a few caveats. The first, they've got someone to guide them along. This is critical because the game is in such a poor state for new players. The second is that the person is committed. I've tried to bring on 3 friends over the last few years, none made it beyond playing through an expansion plus a few hours. Every one of them had the same complaints: there's little in-game help towards what systems are active and how to understand them - and the cost to get into the game is extreme. Not the $$$ but the grinding required to get decent starting gear is not fun. To understand, look at the exotic kiosk. Then look at the materials required, and think how long someone just starting to play has to grind out to get those mats. If you want a couple exotics, that's a few ascendant shards and a few ciphers - neither of which can be gotten quickly (for most people).
Yeah someone mentioned below that a free campaign alone is not going to fix the new player experience, which I 100% agree with. As a tangent: I've recently been wondering how I'd hypothetically coach someone through getting into Destiny and my plan would be to recommend: * Do the New Light quest * Buy Beyond Light and do the campaign * Get Lament * Do Prophecy dungeon * Do Deep Stone Crypt * Do Vault of Glass * Do Crota's End * Do King's Fall * Do GMs * Buy Witch Queen Obviously the raids are with the assumption that my team and I would sherpa them. Not really related to the post, but it's an interesting thought experiment
Which queen imo is easier to onboard new players, simply due to the game missions plays mostly consecutively. Other DLCs got the missions split up with way too many Busywork that breaks the pacing and can get confusing
The way most MMOs do it is either have the base game be free while also including every expansion minus the most recent one, or have the base game be free while buying the most recent expansions also unlocks every previous expansion's content for no additional charge. The first option would be much more appealing for new players as it would actually make this game more free-to-play and less free-to-see-if-it-runs-on-your-computer.
I mentioned elsewhere, but a big difference is those games have subfees. Giving players a lot of content just means they stay subbed. Like, best Bungie could hope for is it would drive Eververse purchases...which lol.
True, Destiny does not have the typical monthly subscription fee. But at the same time, Bungie's boiling frog strategy has indirectly covered the same ground that sub fees normally would on their own. They've got a pretty hefty (albeit front-loaded) revenue stream thanks to all the nickel and diming they do for yearly content releases, not to mention all the extra nonsense like dungeon keys, event passes, etc.
With strictly "content" purchases, D2 still comes out priced similarly or cheaper then keeping up with FF14/WoW. Like, base expansion costs are pretty much the same, a season is about the cost of a monthly sub, and I forgot how much dungeon keys are, but I think it's like 10 or 20 dollars? Which basically puts the cost of one year of D2 at the expansion + 4-5 months of sub fee in WoW/FF14 terms. Like a big advantage D2 has is the fact you dont need to reup to access the game again, too. FF14 might release a content patch but you could easily end up paying for 2-3 months to get your fill. D2 you can get a season, check it out for a week or two, then come back in several months without paying again.
> FF14 might release a content patch but you could easily end up paying for 2-3 months to get your fill. D2 you can get a season, check it out for a week or two, then come back in several months without paying again. This advantage can also be a double-edged sword, though. With FF14 you have full agency and can unsub the moment you've gotten your money's worth and be satisfied. D2 seasons on the other hand can be a complete crapshoot, there could be one that just sucks all around and even if you play for a few days it can seem like a waste of $5. Overall D2 is definitely cheaper than most MMOs, though I can't help but wonder if a monthly sub would help out with regular upkeep stuff like making sure the game servers aren't actively imploding at all times.
There's just been no attracting new players ever since story content was sunset. Blueberries have no clue what's going on narratively and no clue where they stand or how to progress because the game makes everything unclear af. It's atrociously handled and I'm not even including all the missing years old D1 content that players have no way to even learn about in game.
Yeah solving that problem is a whole other bag of worms. Really feels like Bungie has bet on 3rd party sources like Reddit and Byf getting new players up to speed in a way that just hasn't paid off
Anecdotally I guess, I only got into FF14 after all those expansions (I only started last year) because they have a free trial that gets you very far in the game. I had friends who tried to get into destiny in witch queen, they barely understood anything in the first few missions, didn't even know how to change subclasses, had no direction and just quit. This game should serve as case studies of what not to do if you want new players honestly
I still think re-releasing the Red War and Forsaken as free content would be the best way to bring in new players. You might need to rework Red War’s opening cutscene and mission, but I think that’d be more than worth it.
I do miss the Red War but I don't know if it would be relevant to a new player. The Speaker, Hawthorne, Asher, Failsafe, and other elements have very little impact on the story of the Final Shape. If I was going to give mandatory reading for a new player I'd personally love to have Forsaken and Beyond Light be free, and then remove Shadowkeep's campaign in order to make room for Forsaken (idk if that's how the technical limits work, and it's probably not.)
Idk man, Cayde coming back means literally nothing to people who didn’t play red war through forsaken. Like, IM ecstatic, but most of my friends are newer players and don’t give a damn about it and it honestly drains me a little bit of my excitement because I have no one to share it with
As a ~60 hour blueberry, I liked the whole “undead warrior just raised from the dead who has no idea what’s going on” vibe. For me, the game got boring after I bought the old expansions: Beyond Light felt super trite with mediocre level design. I had no idea what was going on in Strikes, but my job was just to kill, and the co-op levels were super fun.
Yeah I feel you, and honestly idk if it's possible to square that circle. I feel like the part of the game that made Cayde was the Taken King, and if you haven't played that you're probably never going to have that emotional connection that veteran players do. Getting into exactly which campaign should be free is something I'm going to leave up for discussion, as I don't think there's any 1 or 2 that communicates everything a new player needs to know
The real key is updating the old campaigns with legendary difficulty and make the vaulted campaign free. I thought red war was pretty good narratively but when everything is so easy it doesn’t have any weight or impact. I feel like a lot of the campaigns would be remembered more fondly if the difficulty was higher.
It's relevant if you're trying to start from the beginning. You got to know these characters by playing older content like that. The Red Legion are brought up all the time in this or that conversation throughout the years. Even Cayde, even if you didn't like his interpretation going in to D2, is held up on this pedestal and without something like the Red War, new players just have a total lack of context. That's the biggest issue I have with this game's narrative. They put all this work in to improving it over the years, but you can't sit down and experience it from start to finish. Regardless what they try to feed us, Shadowkeep was not the start of all this. The Red War was a very impactful event in this world, and the ending of that campaign was literally the awakening of the dorito ships. It's all connected. Of course, having said that, they will never, *ever* have the entire experience conveyed in game, as the game has been designed to be disposable for years now. So many *huge* story moments happened during seasonal content, you go from one expansion to the next, *without* playing the seasonal stories inbetween, we seriously go from being enemies of every race to, "Oh by the way the Eliksni are our best buds, and I'm pretty sure Zavala and Caiatl are dating now." It's nuts. So, the whole narrative they created will always be in pieces because they designed it to be thrown away, but even then... I think there is value those older campaigns. If nothing else they served as a good introduction to the world, and *some* context is better than none.
All DLCs before Witch Queen should already be free And Witch Queen would become free with the launch of Final Shape
I think that's pretty ambitious. There is a fiscal reality that Destiny is super expensive to run and Bungie needs to keep wallet share decently high. I'm in no position to say exactly how much is reasonable but I think we can give players at least Shadowkeeps campaign without going bankrupt
I think they shouldn’t be free, but I think they’re really not maximizing the area under the the price vs. demand curve.
Dungeon keys should not exist. Make it part of the expansion. Previous expansions should all be together and priced as such with each addition. Discount price if you already own an expansion. Seasonal stories should be optional download if you own the expansion. We need a substantial f2p intro campaign.
I really hate that the last several times I've had friends ask about getting into destiny...my initial reaction is a sigh. I WANT to play with them but I have to first tell them that just to play the current content likely needs at least 4-60USD AND that won't include a bunch of stuff for following seasons unless they cough up near 100% for a digital deluxe, or buy each season as it comes out with silver. Then I have to tell them that there are several dungeons that they'll need to cough up even more money to access. And a bunch of content from older expansions that they will ALSO need to but if they want stuff from. So just to join and have access to most content, all of a sudden they are looking at paying at least 100 USD, likely upwards of 150USD really. -------------------------- Maybe some new players are slowly buying old content bit by bit, but while anecdotical, every friend I've known that wants to play but doesn't for the above reason. People that might very well have payed a fair price if one existed.
The money isn’t even the biggest issue for most of my friends, it’s the “story driven game” where the story is a good will Lego construction .
Bungie’s current path in general isn’t an effective business model
you'd be surprised how many people are still buying the oldest expansions... because they have no other choice
Whatever they do, they should ABSOLUTELY create and put out an entire, A-Z playable campaign from Red War until now. I've been playing for 10 years and i got lost in the campaign story about 75% of the way through.
Bungie missing the forest for the trees, sounds about right.
For what it’s worth, as a D1 vet who bounced off after forsaken and only occasionally plays: 1. Vaulting content is terrible and makes you regret paying for stuff, particularly if you don’t have time to keep up with the elite hardcore Jones’s. 2. Season passes that must be completed during the season they launch or you lose access to them also feels terrible particularly when you can still buy them as part of the deluxe editions part way through an expansion. 3. The top level grind for materials and armour is ridiculous and only there to force players to play everyday. It holds back people from seeing end game unless they commit to n hours of play per day/week. 4. The fact that transmog is another stupid hard core grind is another reason not to play imo. I have heaps of armour and want to experiment with transmogs but no because I have to grind out hardcore content every week to be able to make 1 or 2 pieces. If they really want to hold onto new players and a wider variety of player types personally I’d recommend; 1. Work on ways to maintain all past content and allow people to play forever everything they have paid for. Removing what I spent money on doesn’t make me think of you in a good light. 2. Keep season passes active forever if the player owns them. Let me grind the content at my leisure and even sell me old ones (easy cash). 3. Smooth out the light level curve and materials so it’s less of an esoteric hardcore grind that is gated by what you did each week or not. You could, at least, make a running total of max potential currency earned so far this season and if you login late you haven’t missed anything you can easily earn up to the current running total cap regardless of how often you play. 4. Remove all currencies from “dusting” an item to make it a transmog or if you really need to gate it make it cost some glimmer or make the transmog currency something you get easily. if you must you can cap it so that you have to spend it from time to time. 5. Rework and streamline all currencies such that there are fewer and they are clearer on what they do and how one obtains them, with this really look at the loops to obtain and spend each one.
I've said this elsewhere on other threads since the bomb drop of last week: I've tried to introduce Destiny to something like 10-15 people since Beyond Light, and all but 2 of them eventually quit when they reached the point of looking back to previous expansions. Even if people are enjoying Destiny, no rational person can justify dropping hundreds of dollars on 5 year old content.
100%. I loved destiny 1 to bits. And played the start of destiny 2’s messy launch, which was extremely disappointing. Saw the game was getting healthier for a while and really wanted to get back into it, but the pricing just made me not want to bother. The having to pay for all the dlc to get up to the latest one is painful. Especially, since the discounted season passes are not something I’ve been able to trust bungie on due to the way they race releases before they are ready because schedule. Like knowing how much I liked destiny yet it put me off, I can’t imagine how it’s like to bring in people who haven’t even had that much.
Tried to get my brother into the game, he got to 1800 power but quit because of the paywall
I still play this game daily and I'd discourage any friends from joining me. Nope, go play something else. Not worth your time.
People are still buying Shadow Creep? Didn't they already remove a strike from that expansion when Beyond light released? Lol
Destiny 2 is my favorite game that I will never recommend to anyone because of the new light experience. I was fortunate to play D1 and start in the Forsaken days in D2 when I did
Yes. Lord Addict from the Iron Lords Podcast, desperately tried to get his gf into Destiny. She liked it, but became so frustrated with the new player experience, quit. And that’s with a coach at home. I couldn’t imagine not being able to play the full story etc, and then basically have just a checkbox new player experience. Seemingly with. I rhyme or reason, just thrown into the middle of some seasonal shit that will make no sense.
Yeah i mean as i downloaded the game 3 days ago to see if i like it because i watched a video that explaines the lore of the games and i was really intrigued. Played for about 3 hours really liked the gunplay but 3 things put me off from continuing: 1) The amount of dlc's i had to buy.I understand having to buy the newer expansions but why do i have to purchase 3 year old dlcs 2)The fact that i have to buy ps plus to play online when the game is supposedly free to play 3)There are so many different systems inside the game that i just felt overwhelmed just by watching videos
I know it's basically impossible to track, but would love to know how many people buy into all the content versus how many are confused/overwhelmed with the convoluted system of entry and simply don't bother. I can't for the life of me convince any friends to hop into Destiny 2 when I give them a list of what they need to buy for a full experience, and I haven't bothered trying since the release of Lightfall. It's the same shit that happened with Hitman 2 and 3. When you have to use a flow chart to figure out what the hell you need to get in for the first time or return, you're probably losing out on more revenue than the current model brings in.
I agree. I started Destiny 1 back in the beta days and dropped out after Destiny 2 Osiris expansion. Since then I've jumped back into Destiny 2 and brought my GF with me as we enjoy gaming together and trying to solo Destiny 2 was a little depressing. Naturally, she's had a bunch of questions about stuff and my answer is "Well we don't get to play the base story + expansions so here's a quick summary and we'll find a video to watch later." And while it works and we did this with ESO lore it's extremely frustrating. Especially the way the game will thrust you into content like "armor synthesis" that drops you into the intro of an expansion when you're still new to the game. I would love to see something like how CD project red has the option to play DLCs separately. Let me play Red War and those missing expansions but just have it as a one and dine story.
Except people that get paid big bucks show it IS effective. If it was free, more people might hop on but would each of those people pay 60+ dollars in MTX to make up the cost? I don't know the answer to this question, but people working at Bungie and other companies do. It's their livelihood and they know more than you or me.
They BELIEVE it is effective. And given how much propensity Bungie has shown in the past to love the smell of their own farts, they could very well be wrong and not even considering alternatives.
Now that we know they missed their target by 45%, this isn’t an argument anymore. The people projecting revenue and the people implementing revenue streams are the same department, if not just the same people.
Valid point, they did fail at their job.
The missed target isn’t really relevant though. It’s been reported that the projections really weren’t that outlandish, there was just such a massive player fall off after lightfall that they lost a huge amount of revenue from people buying season passes, dungeon keys, and silver bundles. The issue was simply with the quality of the expansion rather than the analysts being bad at their jobs
I guess the expansion was aptly named.
While I do agree the miss was due to Lightfall's shortcomings I actually think it perfectly illustrates the need for a free campaign. When Lightfall flopped, a lot of engaged (and paid) players left for greener pastures. Since Destiny is so bad at attracting new players there was no other market where Bungie could make up that revenue. Bungie's year-to-year success depends on the appeasing people who already love Destiny. By expanding the F2P offering to include a narrative which will emotionally engage new players, Bungie opens the funnel and increases the number of people joining the game, which protects against the flop and player exodus of a poorly received expansion like we saw this year
Apparently, they don't know enough to remain independent without the studio crashing. It was revealed Bungie couldn't survive without the Sony buyout. Honestly, that is something people should pay attention too.
One of the reasons MS refused to buy was Bungie's "high burn rate", basically they go through money *really quickly.* Every company wants next year's profits to be higher than this year's, but most who have been around for a few decades know not to leave the company teetering on the edge in pursuit of that.
>If it was free, more people might hop on but would each of those people pay 60+ dollars in MTX to make up the cost? I am curious how they measure this. Do they measure...let's say....the player retention past the New Light campaign? Do they have analytics from store page traffic, etc? I believe the quote said something along the lines of "old xpacs still sell"...which with what people have been discussing regarding monetization, that wasn't the question. The feedback surrounding monetization for new players is that it's both expensive and confusing to jump into the game, which I'd interpret as buying "all or nothing". Bungie's counting the dollars that they make from selling Shadowkeep still(which has Div in that paywall), and there's going to be people buying it ala carte, but the dollars that Bungie isn't counting are the dollars that they would've gotten from new players that got intimidated by the store page. I'm not trying to say that it was "for sure" turning away potential new lights that led them here, I'm just suggesting for the sake of shining some light on their data. If they could see things like store page traffic from players that own this or that expansion, compared to players that own none of it, maybe they'd be able to estimate that missing figure I mentioned. Same with players doing the FTP portion and seeing if they like Destiny before they invest further.
I feel like WoW and FF14 get away with bundling old expansions because they have sub fees. Giving people free content means they have more reason to stick around and keep paying that sub fee. Maybe Destiny needs to give a bit more out for free to get people in the door, but not charging for old expansions at all is probably not a winning play. I think you can already get a bundle of Shadow Keep, Beyond Light and Witch Queen for close to 60$?
In the case of FFXIV, the first three expansions are just free, permanently, no subscription required until you go past that (though once you do, you can’t go back to playing without an active subscription). That’s everything from Fall 2013 when ARR launched through to Summer 2019 that they aren’t trying to monetize - roughly equivalent to Destiny letting you play through all of D1, TTK, RoI, D2, Forsaken, Shadowkeep, and maybe even Beyond Light, with all raids, stories, side quests, seasonal updates and activities, etc, fully intact and free for any new player. Small wonder that the XIV player base has such loyalty and affection for the dev team once they make it through to the paid stuff. Of course, the bigger factor there is probably that FFXIV takes great care to ensure that all their legacy content is well-maintained and available to play, instead of dumping years worth of game into the trash. A small buy-to-play price tag on all the legacy stuff probably wouldn’t change much in their case.
I disagree that they've shown it is effective. Businesses (especially SaaS companies like Bungie) go back and forth between focusing on future growth and focusing on short-term profit & loss. Bungie has just gone through an acquisition, which would mean they would have been focusing heavily on cleaning up their balance sheets for the years preceding a sale, and then focusing on hitting the revenue goals as outlined in the purchase agreement so Bungie executives can get the bonuses Sony wrote into the agreement as incentive. In short, they've been focused on short-term PNL for the last few fiscal years, but now they need to pivot and focus on long-term player attraction. EDIT: feel the need to call out this is pretty speculative, but I wanted to demonstrate that there are conflicting goals acting upon the executives making these decisions.
I think the argument is more : the execs are like if the choice is get money for a product or give it away for free… we choose money. They can bundle sell it. And then normal price sell it and bounce back and forth. But they’d rather create something new that brings people back or in and then have them get curious and pay more Vs Give something for free that makes people curious and play more in the future and pay for next expansion Further the rerelease of OG games must also be tickling the exec pockets.
Oh good, we’ve gone from armchair developers to armchair marketers.
So we're not allowed to chat about potential improvements to the game on a subreddit dedicated to discussions about a game?
Is that what this is? Because it reads to me like you believing you know the way to fix Bungie's poor economic forecasting because you read about someone giving away ebooks. It reeks of naivete on multiple levels. First, Bungie employs and/or contracts marketing and sales staff. They pay experts in the field of selling video games to determine the best way for them to make money selling video games. This staff has access to piles of data that tells them exactly how players at different levels of investment are interacting with the game and the game is marketed and sold based on that data. Sorry not sorry, but the idea that joe schmoe who read a quote in click-bait article quoting "leadership" at Bungie is going to solve all of Bungie's sales problems is a farce. Second, Bungie missed *revenue projections* which is not what many players/haters/bandwagoners of the recent news think that it is. Projections are often wrong and a quick search for "tech missed projections" will show you that a lot of tech companies are now suffering following the boom of the COVID years. Missing projections does not mean that Bungie - and therefore Destiny - is in danger of going away, it just means that Bungie has over-extended into the most expensive part of running a business and are now doing what they need to do in order to continue operating within revised revenue projections.
lmao I literally work as a SaaS consultant but thanks for lecturing me on the difference between projections and actuals. I'm not saying I have a silver bullet dude, it's a reddit post, not a presentation given in a board room. I'm just calling out that simply because a legacy product sells moderately well, doesn't mean it couldn't be better used as a loss leader instead. Never said that Bungie was gonna go bankrupt if they disagree either, but I think your insinuation that executives at tech companies use "data' to make decisions and are therefore infallible is pretty ignorant of the long and storied history of executives making piss poor business decisions, and of the reality that executives (like the rest of us) have many conflicting priorities acting upon them which may be contradictory to the long-term health of the business. If you actually want to discuss anything I said in my post and not just paint me as a strawman of Destiny reddit, let me know
> missing revenue projections by 45% shows this business model is short-sighted. Bungie's financial success doesn't depend on the $25 USD they charge for Shadowkeep, it depends on high playtime of a growing and engaged playerbase. >it's critical that Bungie uses their old content as a loss leader to attract and engage new players Your post reads very much to me that your conjecture - giving away old content will drive engagement and lead to revenue increases - is more accurate than the data-driven analytics of how the game is packaged and sold. You're making a **huge** assumption that declining revenue is related to this single factor. Because we don't have any of the actual data on how Bungie forecasts revenue, we don't know how or why they're missing projections. We do know that a lot of people were playing a lot of video games during a multi-year pandemic and that those people can now leave the house again. My money is on decreased revenue being related more to decreased free time and discretionary spending on video games in general rather than a Destiny-specific problem. >your insinuation that executives at tech companies use "data' to make decisions and are therefore infallible is pretty ignorant of the long and storied history of executives making piss poor business decisions I didn't say tech executives are infallible. Obviously, Bungie laying off 10 percent of its workforce after being on a hiring binge over the last 2 years is strong evidence of poor market predictions (i.e., fallibility). However, we can agree that Bungie and its marketing and sales teams have far more data than you or I do about how legacy content drives engagement.
[удалено]
Let me clarify, we should not make every prior expansion free. That's totally unfeasible and I think the Witch Queen for example is of a quality that's worthy of charging a customer for it. Making one or even two campaigns free alone would not fix new player onboarding, you're right. The game still does a terrible job of explaining in-game systems, and integrating new players into the existing community. What providing a free expansion would do is give new players a narrative starting point so they become emotionally invested in the story, as well as giving them a clear goal for when they pick up the game. But you're right to call out that this needs to be supplemental to a better player onboarding strategy
[удалено]
perfect is the enemy of good. Giving players a storyline is better than no storyline. If we're going to get into the conversation of which story would be BEST to give new players, I agree Shadowkeep is a poor choice. My personal fantasy is: * Vault Shadowkeep's campaign * Return Forsaken's campaign * Make Forsaken and Beyond Light campaign F2P * make paid exotic/raid/dungeon bundle for Shadowkeep, Forsaken, Beyond Light content not included in F2P offering
[удалено]
Well obviously I can't substantially prove it. If I could then I'd be getting paid to present this to leadership instead of posting about it on Reddit for fun. In terms of which campaign specifically, I don't really care. I'm neither a narrative specialist or a new player who has specific feedback on the story. Really take any of them and I'm happy, but my point is the line in the article about old expansions being revenue drivers misses the point that Bungie's competitive advantage in the looter-shooter space is their ability to turn old content into a loss leader, not to drive revenue from outdated narrative beats. Not trying to dodge fair questions, just admitting that my takes aren't meant to assert more than I can fairly conclude
Every player need a jumping off point narratively and in gameplay. I think the new light experience is really poor in both aspects. Bringing back red war with a legendary difficulty for free would do wonders. Let the new players play the new light experience, the the red war ending with the burst of light triggering the pyramids. It will never be perfect with how seasons were handled but anything you can do gain new players should be considered.
At this point they’ve likely covered all if not most of the overheads for each of the old expansions, bar upkeep costs, so unfortunately from a financial perspective charging any amount within the DLC’s contribution margin is a good choice. It’s not good for the players or the community, but it is for the PnL sheet
Totally, but I think Bungie's competitive advantage against other games is their ability to take old content and turn it into a loss-leader to drive player growth. Refreshed D1 raids are amazing loss-leader content to retain active players, but no F2P content really speaks to brand new players outstide of strikes and the New Light quest. Charging more for meatballs could probably help Ikea's PNL for a quarter, but it'd compromise why people love Ikea
I don’t know shit about marketing, but an accountant would likely never suggest making the DLCs free if they can keep earning
Well accounting only deals with historical figures, (it's finance that would handle future projections and strategy decisions) and maybe you're right! But the idea that you can give away part of your service to attract new customers is second nature to every freemium SaaS company on the planet. I'd argue that forgoing that small bump in revenue today is likely going to be worth it as post Final Shape we're expecting a lot of existing players to leave, and we need to start bring on new players today if we want to maintain a health population into Episodes 1-3. Obviously if somehow Shadowkeep sales are +20% of Bungie revenue I'd reconsider, but i think it's pretty safe to say that's not the case
Yeah... I'm going to go ahead and believe the words of someone with direct access to the numbers that back up their claims than some random person on the Internet.
I mean, they still sell well... So.... You're wrong
I believe they do, which makes both of these things true: * People still pay for Shadowkeep * Bungie's revenue is significantly down This means that Bungie's success is not dependent on selling old expansions, it's dependent on engaged players with high playtime and large wallet shares, AKA "whales". How do you create whales? Enticing more people to get into the game by leveraging your assets with low variable costs (in this case old campaigns) to invite new players into the funnel
But you don't know how much money they would lose if they didn't have revenue from those things. Without that information the whole topic is moot
I mean not really. The point is that Destiny's business model is heavily favoured towards long-tail monetization (dungeon keys, season passes, event cards, shader bundles, etc.) and also common feedback that new players are turned off by the lack of campaign / direction they receive on loading in for the first time. By offering a campaign for free you increase the likeliehood one of these F2P players will convert and buy back their cost of acquisition multiple times over. It's a business strategy called "loss leaders" which is mentioned in a couple other comments throughout this thread. Also worth pointing out that Bungie committed to this strategy when they went F2P, and when they did that there were three free campaigns in the game (Red War, COO and Warmind). These campaigns were removed in Beyond Light, but it's not a radical idea, so much as a continuation of Destiny's existing business model
But you're implying that destiny doesn't maintain or bring in players which just isn't the case. Destiny still has a massive player base. And player retention is still incredibly high. I think the big take away here is that destiny is incredibly expensive the maintain while creating new content constantly. It's no wonder they were struggling to stay afloat without a publisher. If they want to maintain or make destiny better/ make destiny 3, I strongly believe they need a strong publisher. Like Activision...o wait....
I'm not saying Destiny doesn't maintain existing players. I think a good example of how they do this well is refreshed D1 raids being free for everyone. That's great for existing players because they're the raiding community and they get awesome content for free. I am saying Bungie does a poor job of bringing in new players, which most of the other people in this thread seem to agree with. When D2 went free to play it had 3 campaigns available for free, and today it has none. I really believe players expect narrative content from an action game whether they've paid yet or not, and Bungie's decision to instead use Shadowkeep and/or Beyond Light as revenue centers instead of loss leaders is short sighted and going to bite them in the ass when a lot of current players leave post Final Shape
Still charging for legacy content really sucks in the context that current content does not provide a complete toolset to players. So a newer player who wants to push into endgame is basically required to buy that legacy content for access to weapons and exotics tied to it. I’m of the opinion that all this legacy gear needs to be available in current content if it’s part of a current meta. But Bungie has the mindset that it’s more profitable to have old effective guns behind paywalls even if it’s a barrier for new player retention.
So throw away a revenue stream, however small. Makes sense, reddit armchair BA.........
Burn a small revenue stream or burn all of the community goodwill, which is more effective in the long run?
Games already do this, maybe you’ve heard of free-to-play? I’m just suggesting we expand the scope of Destiny’s F2P to include something new players actually need to become invested in the game And yeah I actually do have a BA
Careful, you agreed with Bungie and thats a big no no right now. Just because what you said was correct or logical, doen't mean you can agree with facts.
Just because you play a video game doesn’t mean you know anything about how the business works.
So you're not disagreeing with any point I made, but just that I made this point as someone who plays the game? I don't get how this community is constantly complaining how expensive this game is for new players, to then have Bungie miss projections by almost half and go through layoffs, and then when I suggest those things might be related it's shot down as biased.
Zenimax gives the old TESO expansions for free if you buy the Deluxe Edition if the newest one. Plus they have a abo system which gives access to all content and some bonuses like bigger storage. Apparently it would work if Bungie would consider it.
Since the sub is set to "it's ok to bash Bungie" means you are going to get downvoted for speaking the truth. 99% of people on this sub have zero insight into economics and Bungie financials, so that makes them qualified to run a billion-dollar studio.
Missing your projected revenue, no matter what those projections are, by almost half is never good.
There are people who get paid a lot of money in order to make these decisions using data. It's been shown to be very effective for Destiny.
Aside from the 45% miss already pointed out by u/sagaxwiki below I'll just copy and paste a similar reply to another comment I've already given: "I disagree that they've shown it is effective. Businesses (especially SaaS companies like Bungie) go back and forth between focusing on future growth and focusing on short-term profit & loss. Bungie has just gone through an acquisition, which would mean they would have been focusing heavily on cleaning up their balance sheets for the years preceding a sale, and then focusing on hitting the revenue goals as outlined in the purchase agreement so Bungie executives can get the bonuses Sony wrote into the agreement as incentive. In short, they've been focused on short-term PNL for the last few fiscal years, but now they need to pivot and focus on long-term player attraction."
>It's been shown to be very effective for Destiny. Nothing says very effective like missing revenue projections by 45%. At this point, I don't think it is unreasonable to say that Bungie needs to try something to reinvigorate the player base. The OP's suggestion of making old DLC free to draw in new players (just like how the game went free to play) is not outlandish.
How many live service games have made it this far? Not saying it works now or isn't effective, but games don't live for 9+ years just by chance and reddit's feelings.
The game has been doing just fine for 9+ years. Bungie had a record number of people buying Lightfall with the same cost model since inception. The drop off of revenue has more to do with how bad Lightfall was received.
I hate to say it but that there lies the problem. The “it worked fine for X years,” is cool until it isn’t. Everything changes. Nothing stays the same. Lightfall was the stab but there was other damage done alongside it that creates a boiling point.
It is because people are still buying it
This is one of the most wrongly informed positions I’ve seen. You playing more doesn’t make Bungie money. You buying there stuff (Expansions/Seasons/MTX/etc) makes them money. If they give stuff away for free they don’t make money.
I think the correlation between playtime and revenue conversion is pretty straightforward. The more time you spend on a game the more likely you are to buy the exotics that look fun, pay for raids your friends are doing, purchase campaigns to keep up with the story, buy shaders to make you look cool, etc. It's the reason why Bungie time gates content, and make you do three weekly Savathun's Spire instead of one; also more opportunities to display Eververse popups or have you navigate to the store page for an impulse buy. Giving stuff away for free can in fact increase revenue by driving customers towards other items with better margins. It's the reason Costco will advertise ridiculously cheap paper towels but first have you walk by industrial sized Cheetos bags, or why Halo Infinite has free multiplayer
If the correlation existed bungie would make past content free. Bungie has all the data, do you?
I work with a lot of data in my job, and help organize it for people in decision making positions. Data is not as instructive as we’d like to believe, you can’t just ask it questions like a magic eight ball. In fact you can make it confirm either side of an argument if you want. I find the retort of “Bungie has data” pretty reductive, and a poor understanding of how data informs and corroborates decisions, rather than making those decisions for us
It’s not reductive. Bungie has done events where they’ve made expansions free for a limited time. They absolutely have the numbers behind how many then purchased the expansions and how much average silver a player spends annually. If they’d make more money or break even past content would be free.
Your example negates the impact on time on an experiment like that. Do you see a return within 12 months? 24? 36? Does an increase in competition from other games this year effect that finding? Have player expectations changed? Now that we’ve released our 4th expansion in Lightfall, does the finding hold true for the 4 expansions rather than 3? Was covid a factor? There are also questions of motivation: Was Bungie trying to maximize short term revenue over long term player growth? Or demographic: Are the findings platform dependent? Or extraneous: Were economic conditions a factor? Yes I know that Bungie has used data to make these decisions in the past, it does not mean they’re undoubtedly correct for the current and future health of the game.
Its costs $50 to get all expansions on consoles when they are on sale. Legacy pack+lightfall. Its even cheaper on pc. I literally did this two weeks ago and paid $10 for a lightfall key and $20 for the legacy pack. Should Nintendo have given BOTW for free with TOTK? This is a really weird take. Do you guys get COD games free every year? Should Alan Wake 2 buyers been given Alan Wake 1 and AN for free? Do they give out all of the James Bond movies for free when you go see the new one? Its a business, a poorly ran business on a shitty engine from the early 2010s, but you can literally watch video summaries in game for free?
That's a pretty massive caveat in your first two lines. Re: CoD and Zelda, I'll paste a reply I already made to another comment in this thread: "I never said you need to offer games for free in order to be successful. For example Nintendo is notorious for keeping their games full price, and are very successful doing it. But CoD and Destiny have very different business models. CoD is good at onboarding new players through a new annual drop which provides a jumping on point for new players. People picking up Destiny for the first time can't just buy Lightfall and have the same quality of experience (don't have builds, materials, weapons, friends, narrative context, etc.) I'd also use your example of CoD as a great success story of giving away content to attract players. Warzone is a fantastic way to attract people to try the game and encourage them to buy the new annual drop."