Should Destiny 2 have gone FREE?

CallumA
CallumA
Sep 2, 2018 · 6 min read

Back in 2014, a new industry bending game, deemed ‘the best selling new franchise ever’, was sent forth to dominate gaming with its huge, detailed, dystopian, open worlds, addictive loot cycle and exceptional moment to moment gameplay (that Destiny is now known for), simply making it one of the best games ever released, despite its mixed reviews. So what went wrong with its sequel?

Destiny 2 is undoubtedly stunning

Destiny 2 was released with your average $60 price tag, mirroring that of its father game, Destiny. But on release date, the expectantly lucrative game almost bombed it (kind of) in respects to how many copies were sold in comparison to Destiny 1. Considering the gaming industry, players and markets grew exponentially over the 2014 to 2017 period, it was a huge surprise that Destiny 2 sold 175k copies in the UK compared to its previous 417k sold 3 years beforehand. What? Why? How? Well that’s only half the story — in those 3 years of exponential growth, the gaming industry had a much higher percentage of people buying digital copies, probably to preload it for its midnight release, to immediately begin grinding out Destiny’s renowned loot cycle. On release, Destiny 2 still had 1.2 million players shooting freakish NPC’s — which is a lot, but it didn’t topple its forefather in terms of the 25 million players Destiny achieved.

Destiny 2 reached a poor light level of only 9 million players — this light soon descended towards darkness over the course of the latter quarter of 2017 and thanks to some crafty Reddit users the numbers have been worked out. Taken from a rough 15% of Destiny’s player count, the data shows (drum roll please)…

PS4 players dropped from 712,431 to 158,523 (that's a 77.74% drop if your maths is anything like mine).

Xbox dropped from 594,987 to 127,428 (78.58% drop).

PC player count dropped from 194,607 to 35,892 (a 81.55% drop).

*When you realize you’re game got great reviews, but you’re losing players as fast as you’re emptying the stock on you’re heavy machine gun.*

To put that into perspective, basically out of the 22.5 million players, 3.1 million continued to play, with 19.4 million players leaving the game between release and the start of 2018. Wow, lots of numbers — in case you didn’t understand, Destiny basically just fell to its death at the bottom at ‘the worlds grave’, where thousands of frustrating thralls are now preventing its rise to the surface. Why is this? Destiny 2 failed to fix its biggest problem from the first game — a very uncoherent story, one buried in cards that I couldn’t be bothered to find within Destiny’s website. This story is also (warning: opinion) pretty terrible and I rushed towards the end to find a rather small amount of end game content, about the worth of scrolling through grimoire cards for a single player. And if you are a single player, its agreeable that the loot cycle is enjoyable, but upgrading a subclass that does almost the exact same stuff as all the other sub classes feels hollow and pointless, taking away from what could have been a distinctly League of Legends feel to the classes, which would have greatly improved their individuality, making differing classes actually feel useful in trying to conquer Destiny 2’s raids, rather than it simply being shredding through the same NPC’s to reach an, albeit fun, but deeply uncoordinated boss fight.

But it certainly isn’t just the gameplay that caused 80% of Destiny 2’s player base to disappear. Like Oryx (God rest his soul), a shadow hiding in the dark was sucking the life out of Destiny’s light, poisoning its water supplies, killing its citizens (maybe a little to far) and ultimately was a parasite in Destiny’s side for 1 reason; Warframe, was free. Warframe, in case you didn’t already know, is basically Destiny 2 under a different name, narrative and style (so it isn’t quite destiny 2 I guess). It’s set in a dystopian version of out solar system, essentially with invaders that you need to defeat to reclaim the solar system, (sounds familiar, right?), alongside, grinding for loot, upgrades, in game currency and an online multiplayer, all playable in a shared universe with friends. It sounds the same, its been in development before Destiny existed (since 2011) and is fun to play. Destiny offers everything Warframe has (apart from shooting enemies in the air with Bows, which by the way is amazing) but for one important condition — Warframe is free.

The difference between Warframe and Destiny 2 if they were colours (excluding price).

In today’s age, bought games are almost a thing of the past (kind off); Fortnite is a prime example of a free game dominating the market, destroying competitors like PUBG and still bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars monthly — this is the perfect comparison of Destiny 2 (playing the part of PUBG) and Warframe (playing the part of Fortnite), but on a smaller scale. Fortnite took thousands of PUBG’s players attracting them with the same game mode and the allure of being free. So people who didn’t buy PUBG would attract there friends from PUBG to play Fortnite with them, building a larger player base while sucking the life out of the competition, which is a game with a price tag. Destiny 1 was able to grow and stay alive, because the plague of Free games had not yet come — its simply unfortunate that Destiny 2 was born in a time of change in the gaming community, where Free games stole the limelight of classics like Destiny 2 and PUBG.

And oh my God. August 31st. I click the YouTube icon on the bottom left hand side of my iPhone and it opens to reveal play stations newest upload — September free games — Destiny 2. In my gaming life never have I seen a good free game on the PS+ store (beside just cause 3), so to see Destiny 2 was a surprise indeed. But was it a good move by Bungi? (I’d just like to give my condolences to Xbox and PC — Unlucky!)

*When Destiny 2 goes free*

Obviously Bungi must have seen or heard about Fortnite's huge success and noticed the success of the extremely similar free Warframe, so in noticing there terribly low player count, they made the bold move to make their only series, Destiny, free on PS+. It’s true that Destiny 2’s player base has boomed similarly to its release and is capturing an increasingly large audience, boosting its player base tremendously on PS4, giving new life to a dying game. Its unclear yet whether old players are coming back, but now Destiny 2 is on the same page as Warframe and will likely try and replicate its success, so, so far going Free is a good move. Its especially as good for Bungi as it is bringing in thousands of new players right before its greatly awaited 3rd DLC for Destiny 2, headlining as being able to save Destiny 2 — is this Bungi’s big break? their saviour? will the Forsaken DLC be more widely appreciated after those who’ve tried the game for free have opened their arms to Destiny 2?

Lets hope so, or the Destiny Franchise is likely to fall into the darkness real soon. It will undoubtedly bring in more revenue from the Forsaken DLC, because if anyone did have any interest in Destiny 2 and the Forsaken DLC before it was free, its unlikely they would have spent 90$ on a year old game. But now it is free, its far more likely more people will spend just 30$ on their interesting looking new Forsaken DLC. Plus in the long run, it means that Bungi may have a game plan like Fortnite, or Warframe, meaning new players may come back to this renowned series which is now free and try it out, which may be just what the Destiny Franchise needs. So is jumping on the trend of successful free games a good plan for Destiny? It’s probably the perfect thing to have done in the short term and the long term, now being able to wage a winnable war against Warframe, regaining lost players and set itself up for a possibly successful future like that of Fortnite’s in the future.

CallumA

Written by

CallumA

I like Gaming and I like Writing, so hopefully you like what you're reading.

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