Shut up And Take my Silver: Destiny Introduces Microtransactions

[Lightknight]

Oh, emotes? Talk about the most minor thing imaginable.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Well, they have to make that half a billion budget back somehow.
Scamming idiots with overpriced crap has been awfully popular in the last 9 years so, why not?

 

[Flames66]

Despicable. I hope this loses enough money to make them rethink their lives.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

I mean, the cost of creating these animations would be negligible; programmers and graphic designers do things like that for fun in between the 'serious' work for expansions and bug fixing. It's not like it cost Bungie 20 grand and they desperately need to recoup the costs somehow.

The thing is, while the emotes themselves probably took not that much time to create, creating a microtransaction store, installing a currency, ensuring online security with details etc. - That would actually be a really big investment regarding both a lot of finance and time to create.

That's time and money they could have spent coming up with something else to actually improve the depth and fun of the gameplay/story.

 

[bluegate]

Watch your knees people, all this jerking isn't healthy!

 

[Kyogissun]

Cosmetic microtransactions are a gateway drug to useful items being in microtransactions. This may not be the case with every product ever, but it's fairly common.

Just look at blands 2 starting with cosmetic microtransactions at first(aside from the expacs) then moving onto the mini-DLC's after the season pass.

 

[Poetic Nova]

Well, there went the last shred of reasons to ever gett it for PS4.
Will surely miss my Hunter but after the overpriced DLC's and other debacles, no thank you.

 

[laggyteabag]

Poor old Bungie.

First their game is a huge disappointment

Then they release a slew of overpriced "expansion" packs

Now they think that they can get away with microtransactions?

Nah, Bungie. Let me know when you get your soul back from Activision. m'kay?

 

[Chronologist]

Ah, hell. Here we go again.

You know what would have been an awesome feature to put into the game? Letting players who bought the game pre-August 15th 2015 to keep the audiofiles for Peter Dinklage, and to let them choose to play those audiofiles on all missions where they triggered. From what I understand that would cost Bungie literally nothing and appease a moderate portion of their fans who prefer the original audio files. Players who have been making alts since release will now have to replay those early missions with a jarring new voice actor, one they may not enjoy as much as the original.

That could have been a nice feature for fans of the Dinklage voice-overs. Though, there is probably some royalty clause in his contract preventing them from doing that without someone footing the bill. (So, it would probably cost the customers extra, and you know how well that would go down in the news.) Also, I guess the redundant high definition audio files would take up a lot of space.

They paid him for the voice-acting work he provided, they should own the rights to use that dialogue in their game. I don't think there are any additional licensing fees to consider, but if there are and they are significant, consider my complaint retracted. In addition, I don't think the size of the audio files is that large and for those with the game already installed they're not losing much space if they choose to keep them.

I mean, the cost of creating these animations would be negligible; programmers and graphic designers do things like that for fun in between the 'serious' work for expansions and bug fixing. It's not like it cost Bungie 20 grand and they desperately need to recoup the costs somehow.

The thing is, while the emotes themselves probably took not that much time to create, creating a microtransaction store, installing a currency, ensuring online security with details etc. - That would actually be a really big investment regarding both a lot of finance and time to create.

That's time and money they could have spent coming up with something else to actually improve the depth and fun of the gameplay/story.

It's kind of sad that the effort needed to create the microtransaction service was probably an order of magnitude greater than the effort needed to create the products they're going to sell using said service. They could have just given away the emotes and spent their time on the next 40$ expansion pack, and they likely would make significantly more money that way. The only reason I can see for them to create a microtransaction service is so that they have one in place when they start charging for other, more meaningful products and expansions through it.

When Elder Scrolls Online went free to play they released a microtransaction store that only provided cosmetic upgrades... for a time. Now you can pay to shave hundreds of hours off of your mount upgrade time and their first major expansion requires you pay to get it. I foresee Bungie taking a similar route in the future, allowing players to raise their level-cap and access new raids for $9.99 a pop... if not more. After all, Bungie seems to value a single raid, one new location, a handful of new random drops, three subclasses, and some multiplayer maps at $39.99. Even if you don't mind the price, it's still a phenomenally small amount of content when compared against other products in that price range.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

The only reason I can see for them to create a microtransaction service is so that they have one in place when they start charging for other, more meaningful products and expansions through it.

Bingo. My thoughts exactly.

As someone who worked in computer programming for a while (not videogames, but the work and scheduling premises would be very similar) the costs and time to actually implementing something such as in-game real money transactions is actually probably more difficult and costly to Bungie than any of us would initially think.

Just to put it into perspective, in our old company the development process for a coding idea such as this would probably take around 6-9 months from inception to delivery. Now a lot of that was legal red-tape cutting and working with antiquated systems, so a videogame company wouldn't need to be nearly as stringent or bureaucratic as we were, but we are looking at a time frame of months, not weeks. This has been in the works since probably right after the House Of Wolves DLC was released back in May.


So I would be pretty sure of two things with this 'development'.

1. Bungie would not have put all this effort into such an obvious hot-topic bad news story if they weren't expecting it to bring back a steady financial return for the long term future (Destiny is supposed to be a long burning game after all).

2. The dozen emotes that have been touted as being initially on offer will not be the only things sold on this store - More money and time will be pumped into this venture and that means they have to extract more and more profits to justify the man-hours that are spent coding it, and that will require bigger and bigger incentives being put on the store.

It's not just a slippery slope, it's a slippery slope that we have watched better games than Destiny fall right into, despite our protests then.

 

[Chronologist]

snip

Thank you for your insight, Hero. I was certain that the costs for creating such a service were substantial, I wasn't certain that it required such forward planning and preparation. That gives us a clearer understanding of just what Bungie expects from this microtransaction service - to make a serious amount of cash. This means either they intend to provide future DLC expansions through that service or they plan on producing (as you indicated) bigger and bigger non-DLC incentives. I for one hope that it's the former, not the latter, but these emotes are indicating otherwise.