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

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

There's absolutely no reason for that. Just have the Xbox Nightfall be an alternative. There's no reason it has to be the same 100% of the time.

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I'm not sure how they can argue that the 1 month delay in The Division is somehow comparable to the 1 YEAR delay in Destiny. That year is murderous, and - I hate to say it - worked. I bought Destiny on PS4, and bought a PS4 for it, because of that content that I'd get a year earlier than on Xbone.

In retrospect, I wish I hadn't, but c'est la vie.

Now that we've talked about that, let's talk about the grandfather of being an asshole when it comes to exclusivity: EA Sports. Specifically Madden. Whaaaa? Yeah. Madden has exclusive rights to the NFL. Period. And they keep renewing the contract, which literally forces potential competitors out of the football game market. It's brutal. It's a monopoly. And it's very bad for consumers.

So sure, The Division does a shitty thing for one month. Destiny does a really shitty thing for one year. And then EA and the NFL have been doing a preposterously shitty thing for 10 years already with no end in sight.

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I'm not sure how they can argue that the 1 month delay in The Division is somehow comparable to the 1 YEAR delay in Destiny.

Because in Destiny, it's a handful of exclusive content that doesn't alter the game (except when Hawkmoon WAS the entire Meta of 2/3rds of Year One).

In the Division, it's a huge piece of endgame content to the game, and PS4 players are 100% locked out. Would you be okay if The Taken King had been a month-long PS4 exclusive, if it meant no Year 2 exclusive content?

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I'm not sure how they can argue that the 1 month delay in The Division is somehow comparable to the 1 YEAR delay in Destiny.

Because in Destiny, it's a handful of exclusive content that doesn't alter the game (except when Hawkmoon WAS the entire Meta of 2/3rds of Year One).

In the Division, it's a huge piece of endgame content to the game, and PS4 players are 100% locked out. Would you be okay if The Taken King had been a month-long PS4 exclusive, if it meant no Year 2 exclusive content?

I thought for a while about this, and I think the answer is yes. Waiting another month for a reason to play a game you're presently not playing, and then getting the whole experience is something I'd very much prefer to getting a diminished experience for a year, and then getting the full experience when (a) none of it is really fresh and new anymore and (b) some other diminished experience is being released at the same time.

After that month of exclusivity, both PS4 and Xbox will have the same Division. But after a year of Destiny, Xbone still won't have the same game as PS4 because some new expansion with an equally shitty exclusivity period will be attached.

Another comparison is the price point: If I spend $20 for an expansion of the division in June, that's really the same as spending $20 for that expansion in July. But for Destiny it's spend $40 now and get 90% of it, and then - in a YEAR - you get the last 10%. That's shitty. There's a built in delay to getting what you paid for. Now, if the Division said you had to buy the xpac now and then wait a month after purchasing before you could play it, that would be way shittier, but that's not the case.

To be clear, neither gives me a "good" feeling, I just find the Destiny exclusivity shittier than the division one.

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I'm not sure how they can argue that the 1 month delay in The Division is somehow comparable to the 1 YEAR delay in Destiny.

Because in Destiny, it's a handful of exclusive content that doesn't alter the game (except when Hawkmoon WAS the entire Meta of 2/3rds of Year One).

In the Division, it's a huge piece of endgame content to the game, and PS4 players are 100% locked out. Would you be okay if The Taken King had been a month-long PS4 exclusive, if it meant no Year 2 exclusive content?

This can never be said by a Bungie employee, but I have yet to see Playstation exclusive Destiny content that lived up to the hype (and sometimes I've wondered if that was deliberate). I've played on both platforms from the start, and I've never felt like my Xbox experience was "diminished" in any way. The most substantive exclusives have been the strikes, and I never thought, man, I really want to play Undying Mind. I always had trouble finding randos who wouldn't quit when Undying Mind loaded. I like the strike but never felt it was important to events in the story, like, say, Omnigul.

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I'm not sure how they can argue that the 1 month delay in The Division is somehow comparable to the 1 YEAR delay in Destiny.

Because in Destiny, it's a handful of exclusive content that doesn't alter the game (except when Hawkmoon WAS the entire Meta of 2/3rds of Year One).

In the Division, it's a huge piece of endgame content to the game, and PS4 players are 100% locked out. Would you be okay if The Taken King had been a month-long PS4 exclusive, if it meant no Year 2 exclusive content?

This can never be said by a Bungie employee, but I have yet to see Playstation exclusive Destiny content that lived up to the hype (and sometimes I've wondered if that was deliberate). I've played on both platforms from the start, and I've never felt like my Xbox experience was "diminished" in any way. The most substantive exclusives have been the strikes, and I never thought, man, I really want to play Undying Mind. I always had trouble finding randos who wouldn't quit when Undying Mind loaded. I like the strike but never felt it was important to events in the story, like, say, Omnigul.

Agree/disagree. The "bonus" strikes have all been kinda meh, but some of the items like Hawkmoon literally helped define the pvp meta. You may not have "missed" it per se on the xbox, but it changed the overall game experience in a substantive way.

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I'm not sure how they can argue that the 1 month delay in The Division is somehow comparable to the 1 YEAR delay in Destiny.

Because in Destiny, it's a handful of exclusive content that doesn't alter the game (except when Hawkmoon WAS the entire Meta of 2/3rds of Year One).

In the Division, it's a huge piece of endgame content to the game, and PS4 players are 100% locked out. Would you be okay if The Taken King had been a month-long PS4 exclusive, if it meant no Year 2 exclusive content?

This can never be said by a Bungie employee, but I have yet to see Playstation exclusive Destiny content that lived up to the hype (and sometimes I've wondered if that was deliberate). I've played on both platforms from the start, and I've never felt like my Xbox experience was "diminished" in any way. The most substantive exclusives have been the strikes, and I never thought, man, I really want to play Undying Mind. I always had trouble finding randos who wouldn't quit when Undying Mind loaded. I like the strike but never felt it was important to events in the story, like, say, Omnigul.

Agree/disagree. The "bonus" strikes have all been kinda meh, but some of the items like Hawkmoon literally helped define the pvp meta. You may not have "missed" it per se on the xbox, but it changed the overall game experience in a substantive way.

Well, that's cool for you, but I never got one until long after it had been nerfed (it may have even been year two). Is an exclusive so wonderful (or so unfair or shittier to left-out players on the other platform) if there's a fair chance that you, as a player on the "best" platform, won't even get it? I've long thought the exclusives are not really substantial and little more than grist for platform hype that helped defer the cost of marketing.

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I'm not sure how they can argue that the 1 month delay in The Division is somehow comparable to the 1 YEAR delay in Destiny.

Because in Destiny, it's a handful of exclusive content that doesn't alter the game (except when Hawkmoon WAS the entire Meta of 2/3rds of Year One).

In the Division, it's a huge piece of endgame content to the game, and PS4 players are 100% locked out. Would you be okay if The Taken King had been a month-long PS4 exclusive, if it meant no Year 2 exclusive content?

This can never be said by a Bungie employee, but I have yet to see Playstation exclusive Destiny content that lived up to the hype (and sometimes I've wondered if that was deliberate). I've played on both platforms from the start, and I've never felt like my Xbox experience was "diminished" in any way. The most substantive exclusives have been the strikes, and I never thought, man, I really want to play Undying Mind. I always had trouble finding randos who wouldn't quit when Undying Mind loaded. I like the strike but never felt it was important to events in the story, like, say, Omnigul.

Agree/disagree. The "bonus" strikes have all been kinda meh, but some of the items like Hawkmoon literally helped define the pvp meta. You may not have "missed" it per se on the xbox, but it changed the overall game experience in a substantive way.

Well, that's cool for you, but I never got one until long after it had been nerfed (it may have even been year two). Is an exclusive so wonderful (or so unfair or shittier to left-out players on the other platform) if there's a fair chance that you, as a player on the "best" platform, won't even get it? I've long thought the exclusives are not really substantial and little more than grist for platform hype that helped defer the cost of marketing.

Whether or not you got one (and I'm truly sorry to hear that you didn't), it still helped to define the meta of PvP as enough other people had it to shift gameplay to knowing when and where it was safe to engage a hawkmoon user. I mean, you don't need to have nukes to know that you don't mess with a state that does have them, right? The game shifted. I wouldn't say it was "wonderful" at all, but it was certainly impactful in a way that made the pvp experience on PS4 different, fundamentally, from that on Xbone. To be honest, I can't even say if that difference was for better or worse for either platform, or just simply different without actually improving the play experience on either one. Even so, the fact that the exclusive item was so significant in the overall experience of pvp means that it was an exclusive item of substance. Was it intended to have that effect? Probably not, but have that effect it did.

Does the fact that the gun had a noticeable effect mean it wasn't pure marketing grist? No, not really. The conversation around that was probably along the lines of, "Which exotic did you make that we can have as exclusive? How about this hand cannon, "The Hawkmoon?" Everyone will be using Thorn anyway."

Frankly, all of the "special" Destiny content has been underwhelming grist. The pre-order exclusives uniformly suck (which is why I'm not in the least excited about a black Gjallerhorn - what a shit gimmick) and the exclusive content is (aside from the exotics) so rarely in rotation as to be practically non existent. I suppose the pvp map comes up a fair amount, but with so many other pvp maps in the game and with none of them bringing a special or unique pvp experience other than giving you a different venue in which to murder people, you're really not going to feel its absence.

But even in the face of that grist, I think it's way shittier to hold back this additional content from a released product for a year than it is to just not release an xpac for a month.

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I always had trouble finding randos who wouldn't quit when Undying Mind loaded.

Why do PlayStation players hate this strike in particular? I remember hearing things like this back when it was still exclusive, but then when it did come to XBox, I couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. It seems fairly similar to other strikes to me, as far as length/challenge level.

I thought perhaps the speedrunners hated it because you actually have to do the fight in the big bowl area to progress, but Undying Mind is hardly the only strike which does that. Archon Priest, Devil's Lair, Dust Palace all have similar stuff.

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I always had trouble finding randos who wouldn't quit when Undying Mind loaded.

Why do PlayStation players hate this strike in particular? I remember hearing things like this back when it was still exclusive, but then when it did come to XBox, I couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. It seems fairly similar to other strikes to me, as far as length/challenge level.

I thought perhaps the speedrunners hated it because you actually have to do the fight in the big bowl area to progress, but Undying Mind is hardly the only strike which does that. Archon Priest, Devil's Lair, Dust Palace all have similar stuff.

It's always been one of the more fun strikes (The orbs! The dynamic boss fight!), but people hated that the long Hallway fight granted you no glimmer, especially since you were fighting tons of Majors. These people are dumb. Fun is fun, glimmer or not.

The also-Vex-themed Echo chamber hasn't gotten similar hate, and I imagine that's because glimmer doesn't matter much anymore, and you can speedrun the whole thing in under five minutes For the Imago Loop (and Theosyion Vibrissae Gauntlets).

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It's always been one of the more fun strikes (The orbs! The dynamic boss fight!), but people hated that the long Hallway fight granted you no glimmer, especially since you were fighting tons of Majors. These people are dumb. Fun is fun, glimmer or not.

Interesting, thanks for the clarification. That does make sense, although I have to agree it's dumb (I have so many glimmer items stashed in the vault that I never think about farming it). And that hallway might be the best spot in the game for making orbs/chaining supers. I love running it with a coordinated fireteam.

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I always had trouble finding randos who wouldn't quit when Undying Mind loaded.

Why do PlayStation players hate this strike in particular? I remember hearing things like this back when it was still exclusive, but then when it did come to XBox, I couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. It seems fairly similar to other strikes to me, as far as length/challenge level.

I thought perhaps the speedrunners hated it because you actually have to do the fight in the big bowl area to progress, but Undying Mind is hardly the only strike which does that. Archon Priest, Devil's Lair, Dust Palace all have similar stuff.

There's a hallway / stair climb that is just 20 minutes of constantly respawning vex yellow bar minotaurs. If you get lucky and get the Taken version, you can just snipe the one yellow wizard and you're clear for like 2 minutes of running up to the next checkpoint, but the vex version is brutal. It can be fun, but it's always frustrating as there are just so many (SO MANY) damn enemies. It was especially brutal as a gunslinger before the latest patch because three shots from my golden gun would only pop the shields and do about 2/3 damage to a single one of the 6 approaching minotaurs. It's not nearly so bad now, and I have a reasonable chance to generate orbs for people.

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Also, I have more fun in that hallway than most CoE matches. The trick is to combo Supers. A Voidwalker and a Striker can make so many orbs it's not even fair.

With the new subclasses, a Nightstalker can make it even breezier.

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Also, I have more fun in that hallway than most CoE matches. The trick is to combo Supers. A Voidwalker and a Striker can make so many orbs it's not even fair.

With the new subclasses, a Nightstalker can make it even breezier.

Yeah, it's not bad with Nightstalker. I think most players' hate for it is residual from their first experience there (I know mine is), rather than from their actual experience nowadays.

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Even before the Golden Gun buff, there were plenty of ways to still be effective. My thinking is, don't use Golden Gun on the minotaurs. Use it on the goblins (or better yet, hobgoblins - their armor lock won't stop it), and make orbs for the other people whose supers are hopefully more effective on the big guys. Or use Celestial Nighthawk. Or bring Dark-Drinker.

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Now that we've talked about that, let's talk about the grandfather of being an asshole when it comes to exclusivity: EA Sports. Specifically Madden. Whaaaa? Yeah. Madden has exclusive rights to the NFL. Period. And they keep renewing the contract, which literally forces potential competitors out of the football game market. It's brutal. It's a monopoly. And it's very bad for consumers.

So sure, The Division does a shitty thing for one month. Destiny does a really shitty thing for one year. And then EA and the NFL have been doing a preposterously shitty thing for 10 years already with no end in sight.

Also Star Wars. Granted, other developers can make sci-fi games, but they can also make off-brand football games.

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The moment EA lets that contract end, any number of companies (well, probably just 2K) will throw whatever they can at the NFL to get that license. Considering how much revenue Madden generates, that would be an awful idea.

The only one at fault here is the NFL for putting their exclusive rights up for sale in the first place.

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The moment EA lets that contract end, any number of companies (well, probably just 2K) will throw whatever they can at the NFL to get that license. Considering how much revenue Madden generates, that would be an awful idea.

The only one at fault here is the NFL for putting their exclusive rights up for sale in the first place.

Oh yeah, EA and the NFL have certainly conspired to create a segment of the video game market where it's impossible to compete. They're both to blame, but because the NFL has special permissions regarding antitrust, nothing can be done about it.

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Is Forbes ad-supported? I assume so given "clickbait". So it's not like you're reproducing "premium" material. But still you're arguably refucing pageviews and therefore reducing income I assume?

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Is Forbes ad-supported? I assume so given "clickbait". So it's not like you're reproducing "premium" material. But still you're arguably refucing pageviews and therefore reducing income I assume?

I'm assuming they are ad supported since I can't access their site since I have an ad blocker installed.

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Is Forbes ad-supported? I assume so given "clickbait". So it's not like you're reproducing "premium" material. But still you're arguably refucing pageviews and therefore reducing income I assume?

I'm assuming they are ad supported since I can't access their site since I have an ad blocker installed.

They usually have an initial ad that easy to click away.

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Is Forbes ad-supported? I assume so given "clickbait". So it's not like you're reproducing "premium" material. But still you're arguably refucing pageviews and therefore reducing income I assume?

I'm assuming they are ad supported since I can't access their site since I have an ad blocker installed.

They usually have an initial ad that easy to click away.

True, but the ad network they use was recently compromised:

http://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/security/forbes-malware-ad-blocker-advertisements.html

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They usually have an initial ad that easy to click away.

I get stuck in a loop that won't even allow me to visit the site.

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They usually have an initial ad that easy to click away.

I get stuck in a loop that won't even allow me to visit the site.

Hate to brake it to you, but you've clearly died and gotten stuck in pergatory. ;)

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Hate to brake it to you, but you've clearly died and gotten stuck in pergatory. ;)

That explains so much of my current life lol

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You can actually AdBlock their Adblock Blocker. The system works!

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For a moment I thought "I REALLY need to play the Division again!" :)

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It's an interesting question. IMO the Division version sounds worse. Shorter time, but having no access to the whole DLC, at all? Sheesh. I'm surprised anyone agreed to that deal.

Oh, and thanks for making me think of the fly/mouse thing. I had finally gotten that out of my head.

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They're both terrible, but the one year block is definitely worse. Especially since stuff in Destiny is borderline worthless after a full year has passed. I don't really see how it's even a question.

One month is bad, especially with this genre of game, but at least the community is segregated for a lot less time. The feeling of second class consumer is much less for this kind of deal for me at least. One month makes me think poorly of the platform holder, Xbox in this case. One year makes me think poorly of Bungie because they allowed such a long period of separation to exist.

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