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Comment by izzydata | Hacker News Reader

The ratio of cost per amount of content seems very low to me in comparison to other large scale games. Maybe that is just what it takes to create a game as polished as this. If that is the case then it doesn't seem economical to develop.

If you compare it to how much content is added to each major expansion of World of Warcraft and the cost per year of always being up to date then Destiny falls very short.

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World of Warcraft costs $180 per year (a required $15/month). It's also 14 years old, so you're playing all the onion layers of content added by expansions which were funded over the years by people paying a $60 initial purchase (the initial purchase was finally removed last year) and again on each expansion.

Your comparison to WoW only seems to make the point that content is expensive and Destiny is much cheaper.

That's True, it is probably more per year to play WoW, but it is also what feels like 10 times the content. It may not be as beautiful, but there is way more to do per dollar spent.

Destiny feels like they are trying to take the content density of a single player campaign and turn it into an MMO.

WoW has a staggering amount of content. Destiny does not. They're not even on the same playing field.

On top of the subscription, you also have to buy the WoW expansion for $40 to stay on the cutting edgr with the content. Essentially WoW is having their cake and eating it too.

I feel bad for Destiny. They're asking $70-80 per year to stay caught up on content and people are complaining it is too expensive, yet WoW can ask for $220. The visual fidelity of their content is top tier, if not THE best, right next to God of War. That is incredibly expensive to produce and games at this level of visual fidelity are usually produced on a 4 to 5 year cycle, not actively maintained MMOs with seasonal content.

So they command about 1/3 the annual price of WoW, yet they are expected to deliver the content quantity of an MMO with the visual fidelity of God of War. This is the world's most expensive content treadmill.

How do you measure "content" in this evaluation?

Asking for real, because I played WoW, and if I compare the detail, complexity and variety of the content in Destiny to what you get in WoW, factoring in the price difference, I am not sure I agree that it's less..

As someone who is satisfied with the value I get out of Destiny, I am genuinely curious to hear what you feel is missing for your personal enjoyment of the game..

What would they have to provide for you to feel that the cost is worth it?

Doesn't World of Warcraft have a subscription model? Are you considering those costs too?

I think that's one of the arguments here. Destiny has a subscription model in all but name, and pretends they don't. They want to have their cake and eat it too as a business model. I feel like had they explicitly called it a subscription model I for one would have been happier with some of my spending on the games.

Comparing each expansion release individually to the cost I paid for it isn't working in their favor, and only makes it harder for me to justify "the next expansion" if the perceived $/content is too low for the last couple. As opposed to the aggregate model I might use with a subscription service where maybe I didn't get all of that year's cost value in any single month, but cumulatively it was great.

Anyway, part of the driver of the current business model was supposedly Activision's fault in trying to CoD-ify the franchise, so maybe Bungie can course correct here somehow. (I'm a bit doubtful, personally, but will be watching.)

It's explicitly not a subscription because you can still play the game without purchasing the additional expansions. I have played Destiny 2 consistently since it was released for PC, but I play it almost exclusively for PvP (Crucible). I can continue to play PvP without purchasing the new expansions. The main difference is that I won't always be able to unlock some of the new guns (which is fine by me).

I'm not saying there aren't perceivable advantages to the current business model, just that it isn't a business model that seems to be working for me personally. I stopped playing both D1 and D2 at about the same point where an expansion came out that I wasn't interested in, and I couldn't ignore the paywall. Partly because yes more of the lore and PvE is paywalled than the PvP is.

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