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Comment by abrawill | Hacker News Reader

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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