Editorial: Destined to fail

Destined to fail

          If anything the antics of publishers over the last few months have proved that the old saying “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” is a flat-out lie. Bungie and Activision have been especially targeted as of late for their recent treatment of Destiny 2, as the game transformed from one of the better shooters to come out of 2017 into one of the most reviled and disliked games of the year.

          If you missed the news I wouldn’t blame you, especially as Bungie’s shenanigans were supremely dwarfed by EA’s cataclysmic efforts to monetize Star Wars Battlefront II. Basically what’s been happening is that since launch Bungie has been pushing the microtransaction hub of the “Eververse” more and more, even using it to limit character customization options that were readily available in the previous franchise installment. The first large expansion, Destiny 2: The Curse of Osiris, was met with a resounding “meh” from both critics and fans, resulting in talk of the game continuing to diminish in the crucial holiday season. And now the game has been met with an analyst predicting dark days ahead for the franchise as a whole.

          According to an analyst from the CNBC, the primary source of Destiny 2’s current woes are, big shock, the microtransactions. He adds on that the franchise is at an all-time low of watch levels on Twitch, and that the game is at an especially bad place when compared to Call of Duty: WWII, which released not too much later.

          While the analyst lists off several more current issues with the game, including a vague road map on where Bungie would like to go with updates and a lack of communication from the dev team, it all ties back to one major problem: the players are unhappy.

          Just like in the Rollercoaster Tycoon games of back in the day, unhappy customers will result in your income being significantly reduced. Most modern shooters, especially those outside of the Call of Duty franchise that aren’t granted a new installment every single year, depend on continued updates to survive until the next game can come out in a year or two. The thing is that continued updates mean nothing if nobody’s playing the game because they got burned too badly. At this point I don’t care about whatever Bungie’s got up their sleeves next purely because of how they spent the last quarter plucking the feathers off their golden goose until all that was left was an ugly, naked bird. I’ve got plenty of other shooters that are still being supported to check out instead.

          What I find especially interesting about this specific situation is the source that the analyst came from. In gaming we usually get small websites devoted to the medium like Polygon, Kotaku or The Jimquisition talking about the current state of games and nothing more, but this came from the CNBC, which is a pretty big name in the financial industry. In the wake of Battlefront II turning into a PR nightmare the likes of which dwarfed even No Man’s Sky I wouldn’t be surprised if more and more of the bigger news publications started to spy on gaming for hot new stories. While I’m hoping that we never have another situation of literal politicians getting involved again (after all, only EA would screw up that badly, right?), you can’t deny that there are plenty of juicy stories going around as some of gaming’s usual suspects get up to their old money-grubbing tricks every now and again.

          And that should terrify these corporations.

          Part of why microtransactions and loot boxes were able to climax so badly in Battlefront II was the fault of how nobody was really able to tell EA that it wasn’t a great idea shoving all that stuff into their game to begin with. We’ve had plenty of games shove a mediocre title full of pay-to-win bullcrap and get away with it with just a few bad review scores and a couple of angry YouTubers and Reddit posts on their back. But imagine if one of these gaming disasters wound up on ABC News, or the BBC, or whatever your news broadcasting channel of choice is. Those channels reach a far wider audience than Kotaku ever will, and could lead to the industry equivalent of box-office bombs being created.

          As I said when I started this article, the old saying that all publicity is good publicity is a lie, especially when it comes to video games. While an especially bad movie might find an ironic audience somewhere, the need for constant player interaction in a game will lead to gamers quickly dropping it if they don’t like what they see. And with Destiny 2 and Battlefront II it’s been proven that one thing players don’t like are microtransactions and loot boxes infecting their $60 purchases.

Now, thanks to EA hitting the disaster jackpot, gaming has major news corporations keeping an eye on the industry to see if another Battlefront II will slither out of the woodwork anytime soon. With any luck, the mainstream media industry that YouTubers have been distasteful towards since the website dawned might hold the key to ending microtransactions before they can get any worse.

Song of the Week

The Wilds – Destiny 2