Destiny 2
Just when I was giving Bungie credit for taking Destiny 2 armor out of Eververse this season and making it an earned, in-game reward, we now have a situation I’d describe as pretty baffling.
This week at reset, Destiny 2 players were greeted with a message saying that Season of the Worthy’s battle pass cosmetics had returned for sale, the items that were a part of the $10 season pass three years ago when that season first arrived.
However, rather than offering a $10 bundle to echo the original price, they are now selling all the pieces separately, mostly priced at what they’d cost on the current storefront, including things like $15 sets of armor ornaments. In all, if you add up the total of the season pass content, it comes to around $90, or nine times what these cost in the first place.
Another fun caveat here. It does not matter if you owned the season previously, and simply didn’t finish the battle pass in time (which used to be far easier when seasonal content was deleted after three months). You will still have to pay for these.
Destiny 2
I’ve previously said, and the community seems to agree with, the idea that Destiny 2 has become the most over-monetized game out there besides literal gacha gambling titles with the sheer volume of things it sells at this point. I am not kidding when I say I am starting to get a little concerned about whether they’re having revenue shortfalls, as I don’t know why they’d keep doing stuff like this.
There is a germ of a good idea buried in here. I think it would be cool if they re-offered past season passes for the same price of $10 that you could choose to level through over time, if you missed them the first time, collecting these rewards. Halo Infinite does this with its non-expiring battle passes. It’s still sort of a “bad deal” because previously that $10 would have purchased an actual season, but it’s far more reasonable than $90 for everything in the bundle, even if sure, you can pick and choose. But picking say, an armor set, still costs 1.5x what the entire season cost in the first place. It feels slimy. Why even a simple $10 bundle here couldn’t have worked is beyond me.
On the player side, I don’t see any coherent counterarguments here. I truly do not care if someone gets three year old cosmetics like I have “because I was there.” Also the old “you don’t have to buy it” explanation can literally be used for any video game microtransaction until the end of time, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t call out poor practices when they occur.
I am genuinely finding it hard to believe that Bungie keeps inventing this many new things to sell. It took the entire community yelling to get them to take a single armor set out of Eververse, but guess what? Two weeks later, here’s one to replace it at the same price. Before this it was $10 time-gated paywalled shaders. Before that, the dungeon pass. Selling transmog currency. It just doesn’t end.
This is a huge miss, and while I am not opposed to players being able to snag years-old cosmetics, this feels like a really gross way to do it.
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