‘Destiny 2’ And the ethics of deleting two-year paid content

Now we have the full list of all that Destiny 2 is “vaulting” ie. by removing the game with Beyond Light, I find myself wondering about a question that has plagued the game since the content swap was announced.

What are the ethical and potentially legal implications of removing previously paid content from a video game?

I’m not “crazy” about Bungie here. In fact, I personally do not like most things from a practical point of view, I just think this is an interesting question in the era of video games in 2020, and “evolving worlds” that have to break long established rules when risks kill themselves .

The fact of the matter is that Bungie is denying access to more than less than two years of content. All of the Red War, Flight of Osiris and Warmind campaigns. All in Black Armory, Season of the Drifter and Season of Opulence. The complete zones of Io, Titan, Mercury, Mars and everything in Leviathan, from four raids to Menagerie. Really, the only things left of Years 1-2 of Destiny are the EDZ, Nessus and the Tower, the looting we got from those first two years when we saved it (even if it becomes “sunset”, it does not disappear literally).

But this is kind of a wild situation, because depending on when you got the game, you paid $ 60 for the base game, and $ 35 for the expansion pass. That’s $ 95 for content just a few years ago that just doesn’t exist anymore.

Think about how this would feel in another, maybe non-live service game. You bought Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and its DLC. One day you log in to find the map in half and all story versions are gone. That’s effectively what happened here, only in Destiny’s case, there’s year 3, and now year 4 content to fill the gap.

The problem is that Destiny has essentially positioned itself as a subscription service like Netflix, although that was not made clear in advance. If you pay $ 120 a year for Netflix, you understand that you are not literally paying to own every title in their library. Things are added, things appear every month.

But Destiny has only recently begun to say that certain things have a time limit. Season 3 seasons, for example, made it clear when you bought them that most of the stuff inside them would disappear when those three months were up. People have not liked that, so it seems to change into seasonal activities that take at least a year before they leave. But at least, in that case, we were told that this good was impermanent. That was net the case with Destiny 2 base content, two DLCs, three-year 2 seasons and two expansions, and although Forsaken and Shadowkeep are not yet in the content swap, they may be quite soon enough. When you purchased the game, you were not told that the content of that game could become indefinitely accessible in a few years.

This does not strike me as the same situation as when said, New light came. New Light made Destiny 2 vanilla and Osiris / Warmind content for free. But new offers to new players take nothing away from the players who already have it.

The other comparison I hear is probably the closest, where games eventually shut down servers, making multiplayer inaccessible on older titles. I think I can kind of see that, and yet those time movements are normal, really long. Season of Opulence, for example, was a year ago, and that will now be completely removed.

I’m not saying we should all take some sort of class action against Bungie, but this is really a unique situation, and one that I think we’ll start to see a lot more of in this sector. Realistically, what should Bungie do here? The “normal” option would have been to create Destiny 3 and leave Destiny 2 completely behind. The game would have been “intact”, but we would have essentially lost access all the content seemed relevant to the current series, as we did when Destiny 1 was left behind.

So stick to Destiny 2, Bungie just can not let it extend forever. Approaching technical constraints on space and hard disk with so much content in the game, so the content swap is born, and 40-50% of the game goes into clearing space for new, more relevant stuff. I think Bungie is that technically around the question “but we pay for this content and it’s gone” because the joke implies that things can come out of the vault, and in a year maybe say, Menagerie is jumping out, and voila, you have free access to it, because you bought it back that season already.

I think the ultimate answer is that players need to understand how games will change and evolve going forward. Although Destiny is not literally a monthly subscription, it is essentially a monthly subscription. It’s Netflx. Things are added, things go away, and the money you pay is access to what is there right now. Again, this was not spelled years ago when this content was first purchased, hence the problem, but it is now very clear that this is how the game works going forward, and even if I pay $ 40 for it this fall Beyond Light, that content could be thrown in the air in two years for all I know. But I’m still willing to buy it.

I do not envy Bungie’s position here, but I also do not agree with fans who see this as just removing something they paid for, just how it feels. This seems “necessary”, yes, but in practice it is very strange in the entertainment space, and a situation that most games have never had before in this past. But more likely will in the future.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube en Instagram. Picking up my sci-fi novels Herokiller en Herokiller 2, and read my first series, The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.