Destiny Free-To-Play? Maybe That's Not Such A Crazy Idea

Jason Winter
By Jason Winter, News Editor
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Destiny

You can find articles or blog posts all over the Internet pondering whether this game or that game should go free-to-play. I browse them occasionally -- sometimes for informative purposes and sometimes for entertainment -- but rarely report on them. Today, though, I wandered into a piece about a game I'd never considered as a F2P candidate but that would make a fair bit of sense.

Over on Forbes.com, Dave Thier postulates that Bungie's Destiny should make the jump to F2P. He argues that the base game is already heavily discounted, to $15.89 on Amazon for PS4 (though he doesn't notice the $14.31 price tag for Xbox One), so he figures that it might as well go F2P to serve as a loss leader to get more people playing and possibly boost expansion sales.

It's solid reasoning and not unlike what ArenaNet did with Guild Wars 2. The base game for that was often discounted as low as $10, and it went F2P just before the expansion came out, offering all vanilla content for free, adding two million more players, and, in theory, boosting expansion sales. As Thier notes, Destiny already has microtransactions and free content drops, so it's pretty much F2P in all but name (and price tag) only.

Perception would probably be Destiny's biggest issue, though. Games that go from paid to F2P are often seen as "failing" on some level, and while Guild Wars 2 has mostly avoided that label, Destiny's had a rockier go of it. Also, free-to-play games have a harder time being accepted on consoles. Even if it made all the sense in the world to go F2P, would/could Bungie pull it off?

It's an interesting thought, though, and one that I wouldn't be shocked to see pick up steam next year. If you haven't tried Destiny yet, would a free-to-play move get you to check it out?

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In this article: Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet, Destiny, Bungie.

About the Author

Jason Winter
Jason Winter, News Editor
Jason Winter is a veteran gaming journalist, he brings a wide range of experience to MMOBomb, including two years with Beckett Media where he served as the editor of the leading gaming magazine Massive Online Gamer. He has also written professionally for several gaming websites.

Discussion (10)

Brain Dean 5 years ago
Your blog is so good and i Like this game

Brain Dean 5 years ago
Your blog is so good

Arieswar 6 years ago
Release the game on pc il play loved it on my ps4.
Its a good game to spend some time here and there on far better then Defiance and far longer life span still a good online fps..

you can actully have some fun in this game i did.

Todoran 7 years ago
f2p? welll still a crap game id never play ...... :)))))))))))))

View 1 reply
Merkadis 7 years ago
Every game should just do F2P from the beginning and stop messing around.
When done right and not abused it is the perfect model that makes everybody happy.
Well, everybody except a milker company.

Derpina 7 years ago
It has that F2P / P2W crap quality

View 3 replies

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