Pricing, Episodic Content, and MMOs (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Tuesday, June 23, 2015, 06:12 (3681 days ago) @ Avateur
edited by narcogen, Tuesday, June 23, 2015, 06:20

I suppose my overall issue is with the price of Taken King itself. I'm not convinced that Dark Below or House of Wolves were worth $20 each (or $35 in the bundle). I get that we're potentially talking hours played, but I wouldn't be surprised if Activision was primarily looking at pricing based on amount of content. I'm not really expecting it to be worth 2/3 the price of the original version of Destiny, you know?

The principle of volume discounting would seem to suggest that the more content you buy at once, and the higher an aggregate price one pays for that content, the price per unit of content, whether that be "levels" or "hours played" or any other metric, goes down.

So Destiny launched for $60 in the standard editions and featured four planetary patrol locations, 20 story levels, five strikes, and one raid.

The expansion pass, which was Dark Below and House of Wolves combined, cost $60.

The Digital Guardian edition included the vanilla content and both expansions for $90, a discount of $10.

The Dark Below included no new patrol areas, three story missions (plus a quest chain done during patrols and missions with a one-room encounter at the end of it), one strike, and one raid. (I'm excluding PlayStation exclusives, here and elsewhere.)

House of Wolves also had no new patrols, but five story missions, one strike, and Prison of Elders instead of a new raid.

Both expansions cost the same; whether one has more content than the other probably depends on whether you like story missions or raids, and how well you like Prison of Elders. If we weight all content items equally-- patrols, story missions, strikes, and raids-- which I will admit is not really nuanced enough, but might yield some useful perspectives-- then we get this:

Vanilla Destiny: 4 patrols, 20 stories, 5 strikes, 1 raid, 6 subclasses. 36 items, $60, $1.66 per item.
Dark Below: 0 patrols, 3 stories, 1 strike, 1 raid, 0 subclasses. 5 items, $20, $4 per item.
House of Wolves 0 patrols, 5 stories, 1 strike, 0 raid, 1 prison, 0 subclasses. (PoE is "not a raid" but you have to count it somehow.). 7 items, $20, $2.85 per item.

Expansion Pass combining the two expansions: 12 items, $40, $3.33 per item.

For people who already own everything, Taken King costs the same as the Expansion Pass. If it were to maintain the same price per item as the expansion pass, it would have the same number of items. We already know it has at least one raid. I've seen a thread on reddit that claims 32 "quests" (not sure if that is 32 story missions, quest chains, overgrown bounties, or some mix of the above, or just the 28 stories we have to date, plus four new ones) and possibly two raids. There should be at least one strike everybody gets plus a Sony exclusive; perhaps more. So if The Taken King is any bigger, in terms of mission items, than the content of the expansion pass was, then the per-item price is dropping closer to what the price was in the original game.

And the per-item price for the bundles will be even lower, and has to be. I don't imagine that a new player starting World of Warcraft would have to buy the original game plus all expansions at their launch prices-- in fact, they have a free starter edition, then you pay for the latest expansion that raises the level cap. So new WoW players are usually only buying the latest expansion, and they get the base game, including all the previous content, for absolutely free. Of course they are paying a subscription fee; the best deal for a year of play seems to be two six month blocks for $13 each, $26 for a year. The base expansion costs $30 and the "deluxe" edition with in-game perks is $50. So the first year for a WoW player these days is between $26 and $76; for a Destiny player, that would be $200 and up ($90 for digital guardian, $40 for Taken King, $50 for Xbox Live.

(Live is sold as high as $60 and down as far as the low $40s, but also includes access to multiplayer for other titles you might own, so the comparison isn't entirely apt.)

Still, it has to be said that compared to WoW, the price of play for a year is higher for Destiny, and arguably contains less content.

All I could say is that the price per unit of content across the expansions is not necessarily that inconsistent between the vanilla game, the first two expansions, and the latest one. Once we know exactly how many stories and strikes it has, we'll know better-- plus one has to account for stuff like new subclasses as well. If I could those equally to the other items, then TK could have as few as 9 new items (stories, strikes, patrols) and still have a per-item price cheaper than the expansion pass.

If the reddit thread above is right about the number of "quests" and those count as items, then TK would have 32 quests, 1 raid, at least 1 strike, and 3 new subclasses, for a total of 37 items-- one more than vanilla Destiny for $20 cheaper.

The Legendary Edition, of course, then is the best deal, because it includes all items up to and including Taken King for the same price as vanilla Destiny at launch. The vanilla game plus the first two expansions is 48 items. If TK is as big as Dark Below and House of Wolves put together-- 12 items, which would be 1 raid, three subclasses, and 8 other items made up of strikes, stories, quests and patrols-- that would bring the total to 60 items for $60, a price of $1 per item!

There may be lots of ways Bungie can show respect for long-time fans, but kickbacks are not going to be among them. New players are going to get the better deals. As usual, the longer you wait, the better the prices get. And for those whom price alone is insufficient incentive, there will be perks, probably ones the rest of us can't get. I think "not everybody can have everything" is pretty much a guiding principle for Destiny in all areas of its design. Because if you can have everything, then eventually all the best players have all the same things, which means less variety, and also that you're done playing.

Essentially, Destiny 2 will launch, I assume that will be $60, yet somehow this thing is worth 2/3 of that brand new price for a game that may offer an insane amount of content (assuming it kicks last gen away). I feel like this is similar to ODST, which also had a ridiculously inflated price at launch, was justified by fans (along with the "don't buy it then" crowd), but the fact of the matter is, it wasn't worth the actual price in relation to, say, Halo 3 itself.

Quality counts for something. I would take ODST at $60 (or at $50, the actual price they charged for it) over Reach at $60 or Halo 4 at any price at all. Would I have been happier with an expansion-like $40? Sure!

But we've been there and done that, right? What I like about your post here is you got me thinking with regards to Destiny 2. You bring up a really good point there, and you're probably spot on. My only real argument is that there's the potential for a situation that one saw in Mass Effect. You may be able to transfer your character and things over, but who knows if the level system will stay the same (so as to allow new characters to experience all of the new stuff and places. For all we know, these old locations from Destiny 1 will be gone. Maybe all of a sudden we're hanging out in Old Chicago primarily for whatever reason, or the dark side of the Moon, to name a few random examples).

They can't really do what they did with Mass Effect. You can break a solo character back down to zero the way ME2 did and then make them relevel because there's nobody to compare yourself to, and nobody you need to play with. Destiny 2 will need to figure out a way to put new players into the system as well as respect earlier players' investments somehow. Given that weapons and gear have level minimums, I'm not sure there's a simple way of letting characters brought into Destiny 2 the ability to access old armor and weapons and also reset everybody's level.

I think it is more likely that Destiny 1 just gets bundled with Destiny 2, meaning new players will say "hey great, free game" and older players will once again complain about being "forced to repurchase content" when there's some new collectors/legendary/whatever edition that contains some plastic or digital gubbins that they simply must have, but can't be unbundled from the package that includes stuff they already have.

But you are probably right as far as how this is going to keep happening. Their DLC and overall pricing structure appears to be set, even if I don't think the cost is right or necessarily fair. I think Activision knows that, and I think they know that new people are going to buy it anyway, and current people who enjoy Destiny will suck it up and deal with the $40 price point regardless since they enjoy the game. But yo, thanks for discussing without obvious ultimatums.

I think it may be a bit high. In fact, what I do end up thinking quite a bit these days is that no matter how one measures it, the amount of content Bungie is now producing, compared to the size of their development teams, seems to be declining. Part of this is industry-wide and driven by higher audiovisual fidelity. Part of it, though, I can't account for. Whether you measure content in playing time, art assets, or square meters of geometry, big RPGs and MMOs like WoW, Elder Scrolls games, Elder Scrolls Online, and the upcoming Fallout 4 are simply delivering more over similar timeframes, with smaller teams. I was pretty surprised to hear Bethesda say at E3 this year that their primary team-- the team that made Fallout 3, then Skyrim, and now Fallout 4-- is about 100 people, or about 1/3 the size of Bungie. Now, graned-- they are not now, and never have, done multiplayer, which is certainly a big difference, but I'm unsure if it can completely account for the difference.

Those games always had more content, but also gameplay deficiencies compared to pure action games like Halo and Destiny. However they appear to be signaling that they understand they can't do that anymore, and that just like Destiny is an FPS with MMORPG elements, Fallout 4 is going to be an RPG with a competent and not clumsy FPS inside of it.

I'd like to see Destiny-like networking features in a Fallout or Elder Scrolls game (not the full ride MMO stuff that is in ESO). I wonder if another 200 employees would do it, and if they could do it with less, I sort of wonder whether Bungie has gotten bigger than it needs to be.

I think episodic content like this is hard to do. Valve tried to do it and mostly failed because they couldn't stick to a schedule. Bungie is sticking to the schedule, but some players are finding the installments less nourishing than they want. I think part of it is that the only way to stick to a rigorous schedule is to make content in advance and withhold it, the way TV shows used to be made before binge-watching and day-one content bombs became a thing. I think it's possible that when all is said and done, the broad story arc of Destiny may approach that of Halo 1-3. It may be a bit watered down to account for the necessity of multiple heroes, but part of the dissatisfaction now is that the product is incomplete more or less by design, and there is a premium to be paid for drip-feed content.

I guess I'm more amenable to it because I practically asked for it. I wanted a Bungie subscription service where I'd pay a bit more to get game content at a more regular pace, rather than playing 10-12 story levels 2-3 times over during a month or so, and then waiting 3 years for new content. (PVP is not my thing.)