The eternal struggle for post-launch monetization in games is a push and pull between players and publishers. It’s not enough for games to sell $60 copies anymore, you need a “revenue stream” that keeps generating cash as you try to keep players engaged to play.
This has resulted in a lot of bad things, like the entire pay-to-win mobile games industry, and the loot box plague that infected console and PC games thereafter. You have less controversial things like battle passes or non-randomized cosmetic storefronts, but even those can come with their fair share of issues.
Destiny 2 employs a lot of these different tactics. It sells DLC and Annual Passes and still has loot boxes in the form of its Eververse Bright Engrams. And yet it has one form of microtransaction I actually like and feel good about buying.
I’m talking about its special ornaments.
For most weapons or pieces of armor, ornaments are part of the loot box item pool, or you can buy 1-2 random ones weekly with extra built-up dust currency. But I’m talking about what Destiny does with its direct-purchase ornaments.
So far, these have been on weapons that require you to go above and beyond to get them, or at least do a dedicated quest for them. We have had these ornament packages for Whisper of the Worm, Thunderlord, The Last Word, Thorn and now Outbreak Perfected. The prices have fluctuated, but most recently with Outbreak, each of the two ornaments cost 700 silver each, or about $17-18 for them both. That’s pretty much the cost of DLC, but for something that is entirely optional.
I like this because it feels less like you are having money extracted from your wallet as you chase a drop or try to grasp at power, but rather like you’re rewarding Bungie for a job well done. With the Whisper and Outbreak quests in particular, those were added to the game in the middle of nowhere as completely free additions. And if you’ve played either of them, you know that they required a lot of work to design. As such, I think it’s a good option to be able to have a win-win purchase option at the end of your successful run. I get a cool looking skin for a gun I just worked really hard to get, Bungie gets $8-18 for their efforts. At least from a certain, small percentage of players.
Yes, yes, I know in a perfect world if this was 2001 before microtransactions existed we’d get like 10,000 kills on a gun and just unlock ornaments that way. But living in a reality when games will monetize themselves in some form or another, I think examples of “good” ways of doing this should be called out, and I have been a fan of this idea ever since Bungie introduced it with the Whisper quest.
I will say there is one caveat to this, in that I don’t think these ornaments should be time-limited. If you own the gun, you should be able to buy them whenever you want, not just a week or two or three after getting it. Making them limited time offers doesn’t seem like the right move, but Eververse as a whole has a serious problem with making all of its offerings limited time, so that’s a larger issue.
The point is, I have felt gross about spending money on this or that in many games, Destiny included. But when I’ve bought my Whisper or Outbreak ornaments, it’s more like “damn good job Bungie, here’s a tip” and I get something out of it too.
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