Bungie Actively Testing The Limits Of What Gamers Are Willing To Pay For

It’s that time of year when game publishers infuse their games with Halloween flair, and Bungie’s Destiny is no exception. With its “Festival of the Lost” event, the company promises that players will get to wear masks based on their favorite characters, and perhaps even get lucky enough to score a new Sparrow (mount) or Ghost (AI companion). What could there be to dislike?

The fact that Bungie would love for you to pay through the nose to make sure you get everything you want. That’s what there is to dislike.

To be clear about one thing right from the get-go, Destiny is in no way “Pay To Win”, at least in its current state. However, given how Bungie’s “Eververse” in-game store (which requires Silver, purchased for real $$$) has evolved since its introduction, a chunk of the playerbase is concerned that the game’s lack of pay-to-win mechanics could change. If not in Destiny, perhaps with Destiny 2.

Festival of the Lost dims the lights, adds the spook, and drains wallets.

FotL’s rewards come from treasure boxes that are exclusive to this event, and disappear after a mere two weeks. Inside these boxes are some items that a lot of people want, and while absolutely nothing inside of these boxes can give anyone an advantage, a countless number of people love the collecting aspect of Destiny, so some of these items can be crazy alluring. In particular, the “Ghost Ghost” is a highly sought-after item: it’s your Ghost companion wearing a white sheet. It’s ridiculously cute, but the scariest thing about it is how hard it is to get. That, along with a second Ghost, the Sparrow, and some other miscellaneous items.

With its design, players are only able to earn a handful of treasure boxes for free over the course of the event, which means that in all likeliness, players are not going to be getting the item they’re hoping for. That of course means one thing: wallets need to be opened. At around $2 USD per box, and with no guarantee that you’ll get what you want, it’s hard to picture this as being anything other than gambling. You could technically open 10 boxes in a row and still gain nothing you actually want. These boxes are effectively expensive surprise bags, and considering the game’s latest expansion, Rise of Iron, just came out a month ago, some players are rightly perturbed at the fact that it could cost more than all of RoI ($30) to get what they want.

The possibilities are endless!

Here’s where I fess up. I spent $20 on Silver at the start of Festival of the Lost, because I didn’t mind supporting a game I love, and didn’t hate the idea of scoring some loot quicker. I even got the Sparrow and “Ghost Ghost” Ghost that dresses up like a Ghost. I am not a “proud” owner of any of these, though, because had I realized how the event was structured (I only started playing Destiny last December), I wouldn’t have supported it. I had thought that everyone would have the chance to earn whatever loot they wanted via normal gameplay and use Eververse as a last resort, but it’s almost the opposite: the event severely limits what the player can earn, so as to heavily encourage the spending of cash on these lottery boxes.

To have spent a mere $20 and have gotten every single item I wanted is nothing short of a miracle. As soon as the event went live, complaint after complaint began to emerge all over the Web, especially at the game’s excellent subreddit. People had reports of spending 3x more than I did and still not get that Ghost Ghost they were after. That’s 2x more than the entire Rise of Iron expansion cost. That’s downright ridiculous.

Speaking of RoI, there’s a severe lack of it (return of interest) where Bungie’s events are concerned. While IAPs are nothing new, or the basic concept of paying for aesthetic items, the problem here is that we’re dealing with a time-limited event, so those who want an item so desperately will have no choice but to haul out their wallets. Most treasure boxes like the ones from FotL are not time-gated like this. When a big update took place this past spring, the treasures it included could be earned each and every week – 3 in total. With FotL, Bungie seems to have made it 3 total account-wide (across three characters), and while I might be forgetting another way to earn one, even 10 free treasures don’t give you a good chance of earning what you want. So, the wallet must come out.

I have just one thing to say to Bungie…

The worst of this isn’t the obvious, it’s that Bungie has chosen to ignore the massive amount of complaints. So many complaints, in fact, that the moderators at the subreddit were forced to create a “megathread” to store all of the complaints in one place. Despite Bungie having released its weekly update digest yesterday, absolutely nothing about these unavoidable complaints were addressed.

While Destiny fans can continue to hope that things won’t get worse, Bungie has been giving opposite impressions lately. These issues go well beyond Festival of the Light, but talking about the others (eg: items to enhance hard-to-earn gear) would turn what was supposed to be a simple post into an article.

Simply put, I hope Destiny doesn’t go down the road of so many other games and either become pay-to-win or coax you to spend money on anything other than the game and its expansions. In the grand scheme of things, Destiny is still very innocent in that regard, but again, things have gotten worse over time.

EA/Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic caught the ire of many fans during its first free-to-play Christmas event a couple of years back. While such season’s greetings are a time of giving, SWTOR decided on a different approach by introducing exclusive, time-limited cosmetics and booster items – only if you paid for them via random loot boxes. There was no earning involved. Likewise with Bungie’s Destiny, getting what you want from the boxes is largely a futile endeavor.

The best way to combat this is to vote with your wallet; something I failed to do this time around. I won’t fail to do that again.