Matinees are $5! I rented a new release movie from the video store for $2.50!

Am I living in a world permanently on sale?!

EDIT: I forgot to actually write something about what you said. The last part is important. When playing Destiny you're forming bonds and memories. It's not quite comparable to going for a hike together or going on vacation together, but it's also much easier and more accessible. Good luck getting the kidlets to go take a walk in the woods without a Dairy Queen ice cream cone at the other end of it. ($1.00, right?)

For your family, it is an easy way to unwind and have fun.

For other families, say, where one is across the world, Destiny is one of the only ways they can really interact, because the netcode is so good the 400ms ping doesn't matter.

When my dad Skypes me from China, we just talk for 5 minutes, he tells me about some gross stuff he ate, and we're done. If he played Destiny, we'd have a much easier time spending time together.

When I am away, I just don't talk to my family unless they call me. I say "bye" and then talk to them again months later when I need a ride from the airport, because talking on the phone don't mean shit to me. If we had a video game to play together, I'd spend some more time with them. I'm a bad person, but whatever.

In the end, Destiny is one of many means to an end: spending time with family and friends building relationships and forming memories. And it happens to be very economical for us. Just don't tell Activision (:

That right there is my exact thought on this. I did the math yesterday $355 spent on the game and around 1500 hours of gameplay brings me to around $0.24/HR of current entertainment. around 70%-80% of that time has been spent playing with friends and building new relationships. I think I have gotten great value from time and money.

Awesome post. I really am excited for the days when my son is old enough to play games with. So jealous!

I did a similar computation during my heavy WoW playtime and found that it was saving me money because I would just pay $10 a month in subscription fees rather than $60 for a whole new game (or $120 for two games).

Unfortunately, Destiny's cost isn't so cut and dry for me.

My wife doesn't play and my kid is too young for me to play any game with guns in front of him. That means my time playing Destiny is strictly alone and about 50% in opposition to spending time with my wife (I only play after the kid is in bed, and about half of that playtime is while my wife is at work so there's no opportunity cost there). I view my Destiny play as more of a social mixing with my friends. TBH, if none of them are online, I usually don't even load up the game.

So while money-wise the cost is totally worth it (even though I'm not having nearly as much fun with the game these days), the real cost of the game to me is opportunity cost. What other games am I neglecting simply to be in chat with my friends? The answer is 100% of my xbox games, since my pals chat on PS4. So The Witcher 2 and 3, Bioshock: Infinite, Saits Row the Third, Massive Chalice (this game is great), Dying Light, Assassin's Creed 4, State of Decay... All games I'd rather be playing, but am not because chatting with my friends trumps that and I can presently only chat with them on PS4. For which my only games are Destiny and Warframe. I'll probably end up re-wiring my headset so I can chat in PS4 while playing xbox games. First world problems, yo.

The standard response, and one that I sympathize somewhat with, is that the same content is stretched pretty thin by the rewards system. For Me, as a player who entered Destiny at the release of HoW, that has been less of an issue. I've been spared from some of the worst grinds, so while I've probably had less overall playtime to get to level 29, it's been of higher quality.

All that said, even if Destiny maitains it's current ratio of content to cost for expansions and DLC, I think it's generally a fair deal, and a better deal than many other games. Destiny has much higher costs to continue than a halo or a call of duty. It requires a massive matchmaking infrastructure. It's got an active team maintaining servers, teams working on patches and content for all players etc etc. Traditionally you fund that either through subscription costs or microtransactions. Destiny has neither, instead it' funded through expansions. The way I see it, I view 10 dollars of every expansions as "Server funds."

The anxiety over amount of content gets at a fundamental, unresolved tension in Destiny. Destiny is a game designed for you to replay it, but the content feels like it's designed to be consumed and discarded. The problem is exacerbated the reliance on a few design tropes (eg: How many boss fights involve a bullet sponge ringed by cover with a massive damage weapon where adds spawn in? Sekiron, Valus T'Arc, the Ogre on the moon, so over half the original strikes used this design.) The large complexity of the build system, and the addition of more players helps this. Additionally there are some bandaids in place, some of which work really well (Nightfalls, heroics), some are less successful (patrol missions, bounties). POE is designed to address this problem, but I haven't been able to try it out yet. It's not totally sufficient though, and I think that's where a lot of the problem lies.

I think you can tackle it in a few ways, and I dislike specific suggestions, so I'll keep them vague.

1. More procedurality in the content. Enemies that spawn in randomly? Encounters that play out differently every time? this goes against Bungie's central "Polish it or cut it ethos" in a lot of ways, but I think something along these lines could help. Yea, sometimes you'll get unsatisfying content, but the variety and the peaks make up for it. Sometimes Bungie has a tendency to over polish so maybe this would help them ;)

2. Non binary win states Reward people not just for completing the strike, but for HOW They completed it. Halo's scoring system was never successful, but I think it was on the right track. This turns each strike from being about, "How do I get through" to being about "How do I MASTER" this thing. The road to mastery is longer.

3. More lose states. How does a strike change if it's on a timer? How does a strike change if you have to keep some bauble alive through the whole thing? Having ways to fail that aren't "Got out of cover for too long" could do wonders. Ideally you can start mixing and matching to create wildly different experiences even with the same basic content.

If there is content that is deeply repayable, I think the communication about the value proposition of smaller amounts of content becomes easier.

Destiny you get to play over and over. The movie you see once then leave.

Don't get me wrong, I am constantly on the fence, is Destiny really worth it. I have put in a lot of time, but as others have said, it's doing non-fun stuff. But this is apples to oranges.

A bit closer would be comparing other games, or a movie you bought. For example I bought Baseketball when I was in college for like $10. We watched it almost every damn day. Let's guess and say we watch it 100 times that year. At 1.5 hours (it's really like 1.67 but whatever) thats 150 hours. That comes out to $.066666 per hour enjoyed. As you said, Games are different though.

I really wish this idea of $/hr for entertainment would go away. First of all, it just assumes that all hours spent have the same entertainment value. Clearly they don't. Destiny in particular has a lot of 'empty' hours, where you are repeating stuff, grinding exp, trying to get a Hawkmoon, etc.

Second of all, money sometimes even can't quantify an experience. If you could have the absolutely most amazing time of your life, but it cost $100/hr, would you not do that because it's not a good 'value'? No. You have to weigh the intensity and overall satisfaction of the fun.

This is exactly the line of thinking that drew JRPGs to be longer and longer, but not making them any better. And it's also the same line of thought that drives Destiny's experience, as evidenced by everything Bungie and Activision are saying (not to mention them using the three hour per day average metric).

When we make movies, we make them as short as possible. If you can get everything you want to get across in a 3 minute scene, as opposed to a 5 minute one, you go with 3 minutes. If something goes on too long without actually providing benefit, people get bored and their minds wander. You want them in that movie every second. Have you ever hear anybody complain a movie was too short? Say that Guardians of the Galaxy only gave them two hours of entertainment, when Titanic gave them three? No! In fact, most complaints about films are that they are TOO LONG.

So why aren't games made like that? Why aren't they the absolute most concentrated experience that can be provided, with all the fluff and bullshit removed, and just leave the fun? They should be, and they largely used to be.