Avatar

Which game does exclusivity worse, The Division, or Destiny? (Destiny)

by Korny @, Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Tuesday, June 28, 2016, 14:09 (2830 days ago)
edited by Korny, Tuesday, June 28, 2016, 14:19

Clickbait extraordinaire Paul Tassi looks at the way The Division's DLC completely locks out the majority of its playerbase for a month, and how that compares to Destiny's year-long selective content exclusivity (which will continue in Year 3, long after most folks have decided on their console of choice).


=====================================================


What's Worse, The Division's PlayStation-Last DLC, Or Destiny's PlayStation-Only Content?
By Paul Tassi


[image]


Today marks the release of The Division’s first paid DLC pack, Underground, which retails for $14.99, and continues the game’s slow march toward full Diablo-ificiation. The DLC looks to add Underground Operations, which are procedurally generated missions with random enemies scaled for both solo players and groups. It’s a non-Dark Zone farming area where players can find the best gear in the game, free from the fear of ganks.

But it’s only coming to Xbox One and PC today. PS4 players have to wait a full month until August 2nd for Underground to arrive. Given the current breakdown of the Xbox/PC/PS4 market, that is almost certainly a majority of The Division’s total playerbase. Estimates put The Division at 3.3 million copies sold on PS4, while 2 million players are on PC and Xbox combined. And yet, thanks to the wonder of video game publisher deals, those 3.3 million players will have to wait a full month to experience this gamechanging DLC.

Obviously, this is not the first time something like this has happened. Some consoles get things like map packs or missions early while their rivals have to wait. And most pressingly, The Division’s direct competition, Destiny, has a long-despised variant of this kind of exclusive content deal. Rather than delaying entire DLC packs on one console, Sony and Activision have a deal where Destiny gets exclusive content for the PlayStation versions of the game. It’s usually something like a strike, a multiplayer map, or some guns or armor sets, but Xbox players have to wait a full year before they get to experience whatever PS players are getting first crack at.

So, which of these is worse? Would you rather wait a month for an entire DLC pack that everyone else is playing, or wait a year for a few fun pieces of content that you are barred from accessing?

This is one of those “would you rather eat ten dead flies or one live mouse?” questions.

Both are bad. Both are anti-consumer and both, ultimately, make the games and community suffer, outside of the obvious lumps of cash that the developers are receiving to make these deals in the first place.

[image]

In The Division’s case, when this kind of deal locks 60% of your playerbase out from content, that makes the entire release lackluster. I knew Underground was coming, but I didn’t realize it was coming today until late yesterday, in part because I think there’s less buzz than there would be otherwise if it was also coming to PS4 at the same time, home to the majority of the playerbase. And in a community that’s currently as fragile as The Division’s, where players are desperate for changes to get them back into a game, how frustrating is it for PS players who finally see a big new piece of content that looks awesome, but learn that they can’t play it because of some “lock PlayStation out” deal that Microsoft made? That’s going to murder any momentum this DLC could have had.

The other issue which may not happen, but should still be discussed regardless, is what happens if there’s some sort of balance issue or exploit that allows players to farm this new content quickly and get a lot of great gear. We have seen this a lot in the past with The Division, between Incursion exploits, Bullet King farming, and challenge bosses dropping 4x loot. In this scenario, if something else like that is discovered, Xbox and PC players will get to reap the rewards, but it will be “fixed” by the time the DLC comes to PlayStation.

However, things aren’t much better when you look at how Destiny handles its own exclusive deal. Yes, in this case, full DLC packs aren’t being delayed, and the slighted party is the minority, not the majority, but Destiny’s exclusive content makes the game worse for everyone all the same.

[image]

The problem with keeping certain strikes, guns or multiplayer maps out of the hands of all players is that it restricts the capabilities of Destiny’s live events for everyone. A PlayStation-exclusive strike can never be the Nightfall. A PlayStation-exclusive gun can never be sold by Xur. A PlayStation-exclusive multiplayer map can never be the Trials map. None of this can happen until the deal is over and Xbox players are allowed to access all this content. So while Xbox players don’t experience this content at all for a year, even PlayStation players don’t get to experience it at its full potential, used in one of the game’s weekly events.

I can’t tell if these content deals are getting less frequent, or if we’re just slowly getting used to them more. I hadn’t really thought about one in a while until Underground’s release today, but now I’m watching more than half The Division’s playerbase unable to access new content that might rekindle their interest in the game, and suddenly this all feels very wrong and very stupid again.

Exclusive games are a fundamental of the console wars at this point, but this new venture in exclusive content, held back from other players on a timed basis just for the sake of trying to make one console look “better,” is cancerous and does nothing but make the game worse for everyone. It needed to stop when it first started years ago, and it still needs to stop today, as we see with the muted release of Underground.

=====================================================

It is a bummer that Sector 618 can't be a Trials map (can you imagine?), and that the only way to get the gear is from Sublime Engrams (which draws from the entire exclusive pool), or the increasingly unreliable Three of Coins (do exotics drop in any post-game screen anymore outside of Nightfall?).
Heck, until recently we couldn't even play Echo Chamber with fun modifiers, but it's still not a Nightfall, and Xur won't be selling the Jade Rabbit or Zen Meteor for a while. It does feel nice to have exclusive content, but when you can't use it to its full potential, it's a bit of a letdown.


Complete thread:

 RSS Feed of thread