No Subscription

by kapowaz, Sunday, February 17, 2013, 14:42 (4056 days ago) @ Cody Miller

The fact that Destiny is not subscription based actually worries me greatly. What is their business model going to be? How will they pay for this always connected world?

I'm not sure what is worrisome about this. There is no subscription cost for the multiplayer in any of Bungie's Halo titles, so why would there need to be here? What's more there are already examples of MMOs* that are financed exclusively through the sale of retail boxed copies (Guild Wars springs to mind); the leaked court documents talked about paid updates (‘Comet 1’, ‘Comet 2’ etc.) coming between the release of the full games, which could be analogous to an MMO's expansion packs.

*Before anyone leaps in and yells ‘It's not an MMO!’ I want to clarify that I'm using this to establish context in the sense of what the ongoing server costs might be for an MMO, not that Destiny is such a thing. If we consider that the infrastructure requirements of an MMO represent one possible extreme, and match-made console multiplayer represents the other end of the scale, then it's clearly possible to make money from a game that is somewhere in the middle, but doesn't charge a subscription fee.


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