I was thinking along those lines, too. They cannot be cheap to develop, and they’re absolutely worth the money.

Worth noting, the Deluxe Edition that gets you everything is $80. The Beyond Light Deluxe was $70, I think
So it’s $5 per Dungeon (whether that’s what they will cost individually, who knows). I challenge anyone to tell me the Dungeons aren’t worth $5. They’re the best content in Destiny.

To be clear, I already bought the Witch Queen Deluxe plus 30th Anniversary pack and don’t regret it. Other than the post-Forsaken year, I think every dollar I’ve spent on Destiny has been well spent, enough so that I dropped $100 (or whatever it was, I genuinely don’t remember) on prebuying the next year of Destiny.

It just struck me as an odd tone shift and is yet another reminder that Bungie is talking out the side of their mouths at all times.

I thought this was weird too. They've gotten a little too good at dropping these sour apples separate from their big positive announcements.

I'm going to buy the whole big thing too, it's just so worth it for me it's silly to even think about not doing it. The problem with that, it's impossible to explain to someone looking to try Destiny out how the game will work for them with only some of the content.

I've often wondered how much it costs to develop a Dungeon or a Raid as something like a pure billing rate sum. Wild guessing: it seems to take about a year to develop them, so if you say it takes 20 people working 40 hours a week for a year, and guess a billing rate of $200/hour per person (they probably have pretty high overhead), that works out to around $8 million. I wonder if they looked at how much they were spending on developing the Dungeons and decided including them with the seasons ($10 a pop) was undervaluing that investment.

Somewhere Milton Friedman smiles. I so appreciated this dose of realism. Not really interested in the "free to play" debate--the whole business depresses me. I find myself agreeing with Cody but I also realize that his ideal doesn't reflect the competitive environment in which people have to make big games like Destiny. There's great stuff in Destiny that I wouldn't want to not exist.

so if you say it takes 20 people working 40 hours a week for a year,

Fewer people, more hours

and guess a billing rate of $200/hour per person

That's crazy high. High end across the industry for an artist on an AAA game for example, is 97k/yr. At 40 hrs a week 50 weeks a year that's 48.50/hr. In reality, they are working way more than 40 hours a week, so hourly is even less.

Glassdoor puts the salaries for designers at Bungie from 74k to 120k/yr. Artists around 73k. Average is around 93k.

The people who design the Dungeons most likely do not make 200/hr.

To be clear, I already bought the Witch Queen Deluxe plus 30th Anniversary pack and don’t regret it. Other than the post-Forsaken year, I think every dollar I’ve spent on Destiny has been well spent, enough so that I dropped $100 (or whatever it was, I genuinely don’t remember) on prebuying the next year of Destiny.

It just struck me as an odd tone shift and is yet another reminder that Bungie is talking out the side of their mouths at all times.

I thought this was weird too. They've gotten a little too good at dropping these sour apples separate from their big positive announcements.

I'm going to buy the whole big thing too, it's just so worth it for me it's silly to even think about not doing it. The problem with that, it's impossible to explain to someone looking to try Destiny out how the game will work for them with only some of the content.

I've often wondered how much it costs to develop a Dungeon or a Raid as something like a pure billing rate sum. Wild guessing: it seems to take about a year to develop them, so if you say it takes 20 people working 40 hours a week for a year, and guess a billing rate of $200/hour per person (they probably have pretty high overhead), that works out to around $8 million. I wonder if they looked at how much they were spending on developing the Dungeons and decided including them with the seasons ($10 a pop) was undervaluing that investment.

Timescale? 4-6 months for a Dungeon. Raids oh, 8-10 considering all the moving parts Raids reliably have that must work. There are a number of factors to guess, as size and complexity of concept can add or takeaway not to mention all the bug fixes we don't see. Also, you're not factoring in outsourcing or any other cost cutting measures.

I wonder if it will be inevitable that Bungie will need to start communicating with customers at the time of sale how long content they purchase will be available to play. The service model is now well established for long-term players, we know what is likely coming, and that all content could be vaulted. You buy an expansion you know elements will come and go.

But buying a dungeon, particularly if it isn’t at the time of release makes it a lottery. How long will you have it for? How will new players know what they are getting and for how long?

Our local clan has seen a massive influx of kinderguardians now that D2 has gone crossplay, but our ability to actually play together is all over the place. Each new member has a different permutation of purchased expansions and season passes, so each can only play a select intersection of content. What's keeping most of them from buying, for example, Shadowkeep to play Garden with us is that the rest of Shadowkeep is of absolutely no interest to them, but the full price of the expansion is a tad too much for a raid.

Were D2 entirely a la carte, as long as prices as reasonable, it would solve most of our problems. But it seems the expansion and season passes are still the exact same price. Hopefully, they compensate by having more content of other kind, but it sounds unlikely to me.