Scenes from the future: (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, October 06, 2016, 22:06 (3062 days ago) @ Claude Errera

Everyone subscribes for one month after an expansion. "Does" the content and then cancels to wait for the next one.
Pays $5 instead of $30.
Bungie closes.
(hill valley 1985 alternate timeline:to retain subscribers Bungie feels forced to make the game more addicting with more time gating and micropayment hooks.)

I really doubt that would happen. Bungie would just have to shift content rollouts to be more trickle-y, so like instead of RoI all dropping at once, maybe just the first mission shows up, and then the social space at the same time. When the next IB rolls around, Lady Efrideet is there, too. Then we all get some messages about the fallen, WHAT ARE THEY DOING? And then the rest of the RoI missions appear (it's now been 2 months). Then the raid two weeks after that. And so forth. Knowing something new could appear at any time, people will not want to cancel their subs, but rather would be more likely to keep it active and sign in every day looking to see if anything new was happening.

That would be awful, and I'd hate it. (I guess it doesn't actually matter what I think, though, because if they went to a subscription model, I'd stop playing, so my opinion on rollout speed is irrelevant.)

Really? The only games I can think of that really did this well were WoW and Kingdom of Loathing (KoL is the gold standard of F2P MMO games IMO), but it worked brilliantly for both of them. WoW is slightly different in that they also have large expansions on top of their trickle of updates, but for what Destiny is presently charging for xpacs compared to the actual amount of content in them, I feel like they'd be making a lot more money giving them away as part of a subscription, and - hopefully - we would get a lot more content with less obvious time-leech gated forced replayability married to it.