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Gonna be a week filled with stories it seems
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Oct 31, 2023 23:25
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YIKES https://twitter.com/PaulTassi/status/1719479578576449904?s=20 quote:Other employees also told IGN they felt especially frustrated with the layoffs given that the company had completed work on a brand new headquarters, more than double the size of its previous office and likely a pricey upgrade in Bellevue, Washington. [Note: The archived Bungie blog article was available this morning when we first drafted this piece, but as of 3:00pm PT today appeared to have been taken down.]
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Oct 31, 2023 23:27
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Lol the 45% lower than expected is absolutely the "we made record profits but expected super-mega-ultra-record profits."
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Oct 31, 2023 23:29
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Lol I’m not normally this guy but I’m actually going to cancel my FS preorder, Bungie has lost the fuckin’ thread.
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Oct 31, 2023 23:29
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Marty is a reactionary weirdo, his “receipts” are probably “an exec put pronouns in bio”
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Oct 31, 2023 23:30
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god imagine dropping a bunch on an expensive new HQ in the era of remote work. (I'm well aware of companies strong arming people back in office)
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Oct 31, 2023 23:35
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Salvatori's his writing partner isn't he? This should be interesting.
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Oct 31, 2023 23:35
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Oh they spent a billion dollars in a loving building lmao They can bury c-suite in it like the Pharoahs of old
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Oct 31, 2023 23:36
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If Bungie had to pay a PENNY on a new office lease they're the worst negotiators of all time. Office vacancy is like 60% in many markets. If they moved into a new spot, even if it's bigger and freshly renovated (on the landlord's dime, as should always be the case) it was likely an enormous cost savings compared to a pre-pandemic lease.
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Oct 31, 2023 23:39
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:If Bungie had to pay a PENNY on a new office lease they're the worst negotiators of all time.
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Oct 31, 2023 23:44
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But whats more impressive: An office or no office? 
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Oct 31, 2023 23:45
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The shiny new office always confused me because they've been extremely vocal about allowing employees to be fully remote.
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Oct 31, 2023 23:46
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Incredible that they launched an expansion so rear end that even IGN gave it a five and spent almost a month straight with totally unplayable servers and their conclusion is “pre-orders are down because Destiny has just run its course.” Don’t loving post this right-wing clown.
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Oct 31, 2023 23:50
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Pirate Jet posted:
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Oct 31, 2023 23:55
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my favorite part of lightfall was watching the anus blob / witness backstory reveal cutscene while "connecting to destiny servers" was spamming in the background no poo poo they didnt hit revenue targets, game has blown chunks since this expansion
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Nov 1, 2023 00:00
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RBX posted:Number 1 is that 2023 has been a decent year for games. Like back to back big/good games are hitting. Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Starfield, Spider-Man 2, Super Mario Bros Wonder all close to each other. I feel like the sign something was wrong was when the community gave so much traction to that Aztecross video giving the history of the game's monetization, and pointing out that the commercial part of the game is so intimidating that it slows growth of the game and makes it harder to sell, and TWAB the next weeks didn't address the discussion at all, meaning leadership was confident in their plan to charge new players $12 for some Forsaken exotics. Management was confident in the less consumer friendly approach of boosting the amount of silver to buy a season instead of just boosting the price of silver packs in USD like League of Legends and Fortnite did. Destiny's had some murmuring about the price of content ever since the dungeon pass was revealed, but it reached a fever pitch this year and the community team were apparently instructed to act like nothing is happening.
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Nov 1, 2023 00:06
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Bobby Deluxe posted:It's so much worse than that, it kind of sounds like they had it built. As in they own it. (largely off topic but they are just 1 tenant in a bigass 20 year old office building in Bellevue. They just use the term 'build' as in like 'build out' with new walls for offices, break rooms, cubicle farms etc. ) They're in one of those standard buildings that has a lawyer's office on the top floor, some software companies on the middle, a Men's Wearhouse and Starbucks on the ground floor etc  They "only" cut 8% (still too much) of the work force so they probably really do need the space for whatever the hell they do all day there!
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Nov 1, 2023 00:10
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Craptacular! posted:I feel like the sign something was wrong was when the community gave so much traction to that Aztecross video giving the history of the game's monetization, and pointing out that the commercial part of the game is so intimidating that it slows growth of the game and makes it harder to sell, and TWAB the next weeks didn't address the discussion at all, meaning leadership was confident in their plan to charge new players $12 for some Forsaken exotics. Management was confident in the less consumer friendly approach of boosting the amount of silver to buy a season instead of just boosting the price of silver packs in USD like League of Legends and Fortnite did. Management gets to make all the decisions while the people at Bungie who just do their job have to deal with all the harassment from the community. This is why Dmg quit. After all the issues the past couple years with harassment and leaks from their content creator summits, Bungie cut down on their community interaction when the game needed it the most. The microtransactions becoming a problem for the game is actually nothing new, but people still bought them because they enjoyed the game. Nobody buys that content when they hate the game and aren't playing it.
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Nov 1, 2023 00:31
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Hey Pete. You're going on 48 hours without telling your playerbase anything and your company is loving leaking like a sieve right now. Hey Pete. You gonna loving do anything about any of this? Pete?
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Nov 1, 2023 00:40
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a benefit of gently caress you money is going gently caress you a lot
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Nov 1, 2023 00:42
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All they have to do to fix things is make sure The Final Shape knocks it out of the park, the coinciding episodes are amazing, and vastly reduce the gouging on microtransactions they've been doing to players, as well as probably raising the bar for quality and quantity of content provided (good examples being armour sets, etc), and continue proper support to give the playerbase assurance that their money is not in vain. As long as they do that people will play again and things will be fine. So no biggie right?
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Nov 1, 2023 00:47
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Michael Salvatori specifically said he is confident that Bungie is going to be just fine If you ignore the part of this that ruins actual human being's lives, the process is actually good for the company and (eventually) the product
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Nov 1, 2023 00:52
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syntaxfunction posted:All they have to do to fix things is make sure The Final Shape knocks it out of the park, the coinciding episodes are amazing, and vastly reduce the gouging on microtransactions they've been doing to players, as well as probably raising the bar for quality and quantity of content provided (good examples being armour sets, etc), and continue proper support to give the playerbase assurance that their money is not in vain. As long as they do that people will play again and things will be fine. And another 100 vault spots please. Seriously though, this sucks.
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Nov 1, 2023 00:58
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syntaxfunction posted:All they have to do to fix things is make sure The Final Shape knocks it out of the park, the coinciding episodes are amazing, and vastly reduce the gouging on microtransactions they've been doing to players, as well as probably raising the bar for quality and quantity of content provided (good examples being armour sets, etc), and continue proper support to give the playerbase assurance that their money is not in vain. As long as they do that people will play again and things will be fine. I don't have a problem with the cost of new content, it's a $100 a year game when it was originally $40 but you get a lot more than you did back then so that's okay. The problem is that the game is only useful if you can get people to play it with, and they want to charge people money in 2023 for content they budgeted for in 2017. One of the benefits of WoW is that the buy-in is just the sub fee. You can't play the current expansion with the big kids but the entire back library is included in the $15, and even if they cut half of it down like Destiny does it would do a lot of goodwill if old expansions were bundled into the current one. It would mean less money made by old expansions, but that would be offset by people who don't play feeling more confident in purchasing the current one. Destiny is the only MMO like I know where people ask veterans to debate buying the current chapter of the story or spending that money on a box of all the old chapters instead. Like people hold EA Sports up as the worst of corporate greed but they're efficiently evil, as they want you to buy this year's sports/gambling simulator regardless what year it is. Nobody debates between buying Madden 23 or buying Madden 19-21 together. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Nov 1, 2023 |
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Nov 1, 2023 01:08
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syntaxfunction posted:All they have to do to fix things is make sure The Final Shape knocks it out of the park, the coinciding episodes are amazing, and vastly reduce the gouging on microtransactions they've been doing to players, as well as probably raising the bar for quality and quantity of content provided (good examples being armour sets, etc), and continue proper support to give the playerbase assurance that their money is not in vain. As long as they do that people will play again and things will be fine. Pete Parsons: Best I can do is another Shadowkeep. It's funny though I look back and Forsaken, Shadowkeep, and Beyond Light's seasons were generally loving awesome with some hiccups here and there (Season of the Worthy). Witch Queen and Lightfall's significantly less so.
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Nov 1, 2023 01:10
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Witch Queen and Lightfall's seasons hold down Forsaken and Shadowkeep's seasons and beat the everloving poo poo out of them. Forsaken's seasons are so overrated, it boggles my mind.
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Nov 1, 2023 01:13
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:If you ignore the part of this that ruins actual human being's lives, the process is actually good for the company and (eventually) the product 
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Nov 1, 2023 01:20
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I think it makes more sense to compare the year of content to another year of content. Year two was packed to the girls and had very few moments of twiddling thumbs and wondering what comes next. In a vacuum I agree that Menagerie is no better than Deep dive, but the seasonal activity did not need to do as much heavy lifting back then when there was an enormous amount of attention given to the core playlists for the year
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Nov 1, 2023 01:23
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Destiny 2 Lightfall: Please don't stop making this game.
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Nov 1, 2023 01:32
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:I think it makes more sense to compare the year of content to another year of content. Year two was packed to the girls and had very few moments of twiddling thumbs and wondering what comes next. In a vacuum I agree that Menagerie is no better than Deep dive, but the seasonal activity did not need to do as much heavy lifting back then when there was an enormous amount of attention given to the core playlists for the year This I feel is a much better and more succient response than I was going to make. I can agree the production value quality of the later seasons and narrative quality is generally much better. And some of them (season of the seraph) are really good. But I'd rather have a season that has good content that lasts the entire ride rather than six to eight weeks worth of content and then a completely dead month. It was a lot more fun and made a lot more sense to me that the seasonal content in Dawn, Worthy, Arrival, Chosen, and Splicer lasted the entire duration and generally had a strong narrative payoff that carried over shortly into the next season. That and I feel like not only were seasonal activities like Sundial a lot more fun, but you could bet a lot of the content wasn't simply reissues or reskins. And if it was, it tended to be more interesting stuff. We still don't have a void 600 auto since Arrivals, for instance. quote:Destiny 2 Lightfall: Please don't stop making this game. 
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Nov 1, 2023 01:37
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Extremely excited to have the game be fully voiced, developed, advertised, and played only by Nolan North.
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Nov 1, 2023 01:38
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The thing is it is entirely within Bungie's capabilities to deliver, and I'd have no problem buying the expansion and seasons for that. They clearly overestimated how many people are willing to pay for dungeon keys and event cards, etc as well as how many people would stick around for the seasons. It isn't the end of the world, but they need to pull their heads in and actually deliver. With the extra months of the next season I'm really hoping they use the time to really put some value in to the core game, not just the expansion, both in content and mechanically. Hopefully the new format for episodes will reduce the dead air in seasons as well, we'll see, they certainly seem to be upping the amount of content (at least items) they're doing. At the end of the day I'll play until I am not having fun. Maybe it'll be before TFS, maybe during the expansion, maybe after. Who knows. I'll get off the ride eventually, it is just a game, and if anyone has been feeling done with the game for a while I suggest just bailing. Worst case come back later if you want, you aren't obliged to wait around for the game to "become fun/good again". And hey, if The Final Shape is terrible you can just substitute headcanon if you never see the actual story 
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Nov 1, 2023 01:52
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Bobby Deluxe posted:The projection is "you have to be making more than you did last year" when both WFH seems to be ending everywhere (as SgtSteel observed) and a cost-of-living crisis is hitting too. Totally well said. And definitely agree. Its hitting my business too which is not software stuff. Like, covid and supply chain lead to a crazy good year for people placing orders three years in advance. Huge intake on orders. Year two orders tank because they have been placed for years out (shocked pikachu). Then supply chain starts to catch up, people cancel those super far out orders to capture their capital back. Revenue recognition goes up, orders plummet. The 21 year old accenture consultant hive mind of course says (lets assume aggressive growth with the crazy good order tear as a baseline, we love that number) and when it doesn’t happen (because no one with half a brain thought it would) they do internal panic mail blasts that “earnings are plummeting!!!! We must take immediate and drastic action” Like bitch you made up those numbers out of the worst reasoning available to you and I just don’t know what Im more shocked about…the fact they are straining credulity with their “these forecasts were reasoned and good” or that they expect that puppet show is supposed to convince everyone else?
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Nov 1, 2023 02:12
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:I think it makes more sense to compare the year of content to another year of content. Year two was packed to the girls and had very few moments of twiddling thumbs and wondering what comes next. In a vacuum I agree that Menagerie is no better than Deep dive, but the seasonal activity did not need to do as much heavy lifting back then when there was an enormous amount of attention given to the core playlists for the year They....weren't, though? Like, the only thing I can think of that year 2 maybe has over year 5 and 6 content-wise is that it had three raids and one dungeon instead of one raid, one refurbished raid and two dungeons (and frankly, I'll take Crota's End over Scourge or Crown). Otherwise, three seasons vs. four and two of those seasons were insanely threadbare and covered it up by making gear as tedious and arduous as possible to get. To get one Blast Furnace in Season of the Forge, you had to 1) Spend 1 Ballistic Log or 6 Modulus Reports to buy a Pulse Rifle frame 2) Go get a bunch of multikills with a pulse rifle. 3) Go kill powerful enemies to get radiant seeds. 4) Talk to Ada 5) Do a forge to finish the weapon. 6) And by the way, Ballistic Logs are capped at 2 per week and Modulus Reports are capped at 15 overall, so you can do like four of these in a row at best before you have to go grind more Modulus Reports. To get a gun in Season of the Witch, you have to 1) Get engrams by doing Spire or Altars. 2) Spend the engrams at the HELM. 3) Engrams are capped at 99 and there's no way you'll ever run out. 4) btw have a bunch of free engrams and deepsights from the Opaque Cards to make it even easier to get what you want. Year 2 wasn't rich with content, it just stretched out what it had and made it more of a pain in the rear end to get gear because Bungie brought random rolls back and then spent most of year 2 terrified of us actually being able to farm them. And they weren't knocking it out of the park with the stories, either. Season of the Forge was like, oh, Ada-1 doesn't like Guardians, but these Fallen are loving with her family's stuff so she has no point but to trust you, so go kill some Fallen and unlock her family's forges and.....that's it. Unless you really go the extra mile, then you can fight Siviks with absolutely no context or build-up, give Ada-1 a thing that makes her glow and she chills out and she likes you now. Season of the Drifter tried a little bit harder with the story with Invitations of the Nine and the "choose the Vanguard or choose Drifter" thing that's gonna have all of these future ramifications....and the mission is the exact same either way, it lasts one week, and the ramifications are you get one weekly drop from Ikora or a different weekly drop from Drifter, Drifter calls you rat for a little while if you picked against him, and the choice you made never comes up again after this season. Now go back to playing Gambit Prime, have fun with those double overshield Invaders! Like, the main difference between year 2/3 and year 5/6 to me is that there's less timegating, less stretching things out, fewer gates to getting the stuff you want and actual stories with actual characters and stuff like, a plot, and stakes and a beginning, middle and end. All the "dead time" in the seasons this year is just....the time we would've spent grinding back to the power cap or grinding out stupid overcomplicated currencies to do stupid overcomplicated routes to get one roll of a gun. I thought Bungie got rid of that stuff because people were sick of it? And I can't think of what attention the core playlists were getting that they aren't getting now, besides, uh, Gambit Prime, which was....really loving terrible! At least now we get a few Battlegrounds tossed into the Vanguard Ops list every so often.
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Nov 1, 2023 02:49
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I wonder what they expect the average player to pay? My financial engagement with Destiny is the annual deluxe expansion pack purchase, for one year of content, which seems fair. I give zero fucks (and dollars) to Eververse. Their content purchasing system seems really dumb for anyone trying to catch up or buy poo poo piecemeal, and I'm wondering if that's driven people away.
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Nov 1, 2023 02:50
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MJeff posted:They....weren't, though? Like, the only thing I can think of that year 2 maybe has over year 5 and 6 content-wise is that it had three raids and one dungeon instead of one raid, one refurbished raid and two dungeons (and frankly, I'll take Crota's End over Scourge or Crown). Otherwise, three seasons vs. four and two of those seasons were insanely threadbare and covered it up by making gear as tedious and arduous as possible to get. To get one Blast Furnace in Season of the Forge, you had to 3 raids, 2 dungies, tons of new strikes and Crucible maps and a whole entire new mode of Gambit
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Nov 1, 2023 03:18
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:3 raids, 2 dungies, tons of new strikes and Crucible maps and a whole entire new mode of Gambit I don't think Scourge, Crown, Throne or Prophecy are particularly better than the endgame content we're getting nowadays, I'm pretty sure I would take refurbished Crota over Scourge or Crown and I would take any Y4/5/6 dungeon, including the one that isn't out yet, over Prophecy, but Last Wish is probably still the best raid they've ever made (even if I think Vow is close) and Root kind of sucked, so, whatever. The strikes from Y2/Y3 are not better than the strikes and Battlegrounds from Y4/Y5/Y6. Crucible maps don't matter. It's just all the same lovely problems of Crucible in a new set of rooms that will become old and boring again in a couple weeks. Having Gambit Prime is not a point in year two's favor, Gambit is a miserable failure and it's a blessing that Bungie finally gave up on it this year.
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Nov 1, 2023 03:39
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ponzicar posted:I wonder what they expect the average player to pay? My financial engagement with Destiny is the annual deluxe expansion pack purchase, for one year of content, which seems fair. I give zero fucks (and dollars) to Eververse. Their content purchasing system seems really dumb for anyone trying to catch up or buy poo poo piecemeal, and I'm wondering if that's driven people away. On top of the completely opaque new player experience you also need to spend like $200 to gain access to all the content which is a huge ask. For people who are actually going to play throughout the year it's comparable or cheaper than WoW or whatever, sure. But it's a big chunk up-front for the random blueberry who can't even comprehend if they like the game or its loop yet, or even the returning player who thinks they need to pick up the Legacy Collection/Anniversary/Lightfall.
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Nov 1, 2023 03:40
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acumen posted:On top of the completely opaque new player experience you also need to spend like $200 to gain access to all the content which is a huge ask. For people who are actually going to play throughout the year it's comparable or cheaper than WoW or whatever, sure. But it's a big chunk up-front for the random blueberry who can't even comprehend if they like the game or its loop yet, or even the returning player who thinks they need to pick up the Legacy Collection/Anniversary/Lightfall. I don't ever hate my friends enough to let them start playing destiny. One messaged me asking "do I want hunter, warlock or titan" and I said uninstall was the preferable option. They didn't follow my advice and quit a month later after having spent their $200 getting the content. These last few days really suck for a lot of reasons. It was inevitable Bungie was going to eventually shrink in some way. They aren't doing well (-45% Revenue projection). Sony isn't doing well (and being restructured completely), tech industry in general isn't going well, there's high inflation and cost of living crises happening in many places across the world, and GaaS seems to be dying a slow death. I think that 45% revenue loss can't be understated. I don't know any company that would look at that and say "we cannot shed a single member of staff" I'd expect there to be apocalyptic cost saving at Bungie for the next year, if they even survive. Everyone who lost their job, I hope they find some great projects to fit into as soon as possible and continue to make great games elsewhere. syntaxfunction posted:At the end of the day I'll play until I am not having fun.
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Nov 1, 2023 03:57
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| # ? May 27, 2024 11:34 |
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ponzicar posted:I wonder what they expect the average player to pay? My financial engagement with Destiny is the annual deluxe expansion pack purchase, for one year of content, which seems fair. I give zero fucks (and dollars) to Eververse. Their content purchasing system seems really dumb for anyone trying to catch up or buy poo poo piecemeal, and I'm wondering if that's driven people away. They probably like you because you have upfronted them money for content they haven't developed yet, which allows them to predict budgeting and suggests you're a reliable player. In an ideal world, everyone would buy the CE and they could cut production costs developing the seasonal post-launch stuff because you already gave them your money.  However, while the game grows it probably only bleeds players like you, and they're probably not selling as many season passes and dungeon keys as they once did due to a combination of the lackluster Lightfall launch content combined with this being a monster year or incredible video games. We're at the point where something like Tears of the Kingdom or FF16 can be forgotten about under the Barbenheimer that has been Armored Core and Baldurs Gate. To the nothing about Spider-Man or the "good at last" version of Cyberpunk, all of which seem like something the Destiny audience might be very into. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 04:08 on Nov 1, 2023 |
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Nov 1, 2023 04:05
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