‘Destiny 2’ And The Ethics Of Deleting Two Years Of Paid Content

Destiny 2 is deleting from the game with Beyond Light. In the era of video games in 2020, evolving worlds have to break long-established rules or risk strangling themselves to death. Bungie is removing access two years of content. All of the Red War, Curse of Osiris, and Warmind campaigns. Everything in Black Armory, Season of the Drifter, and Season of Opulence.

The full zones of Io, Titan, Mercury, Mars, and everything in Leviathan, from four raids to Menagerie. The only things left from Years 1-2 of Destiny are the EDZ, Nessus, the Tower, and the loot from first two years. Even if it is being “sunset”, it is not disappearing. This is kind of a wild situation because depending on when you got the game, $60 for the base game and $35 for the expansion pass, that is $95 for content just a few years ago that simply no longer exists.

Think about how this would feel, you log in to find the map cut in half and all the story missions gone. There is year 3 and 4 content to fill the gap. The problem is Destiny 2 has essentially positioned itself as a subscription service like Netflix, although that was not made clear up front. When you pay $120 a year for Netflix, you understand you are not literally paying to own every title in its library. Things are added, things depart every month.

But Destiny 2 has only recently began saying up front that certain things have a time limit.

Year 3’s seasons, for instance, made it clear when you bought them that most of the stuff within them would disappear when those three months were up. People have not liked that, so it appears to be changing to seasonal activities lasting at least a year before they leave. But at least in that case, people were told up front this stuff was impermanent.

That was not the case with Destiny 2 base content, two DLCs, three year 2 seasons and two expansions, and even though Forsaken and Shadowkeep are not in the content vault yet, they very well could be soon enough. When you bought the game, you were not told that in a few years, the content of that game might become inaccessible indefinitely. New Light made the game vanilla and Osiris/Warmind content free.

But offering something for free to new players does not take anything away from the players that already own it. The other comparison is perhaps the closest, where games eventually turn off servers making multiplayer inaccessible on older titles. Those timetables are usually really long. Season of Opulence, for instance, was a year ago, and now that is going to be completely wiped.

This is a unique situation, and one we are going to start seeing a lot more of in this industry.

Realistically, the normal option would have been to make Destiny 3 and leave Destiny 2 behind completely. The game would have been intact but we would have essentially lost access to all its content as relevant for the current series, as we did when Destiny 1 got left behind. So sticking with the game, Bungie simply can not have it keep expanding forever.

Destiny 2 is approaching technical and hard drive space limitations with so much content in the game, so the content vault was born, and 40-50% of the game is heading into it to clear out room for new, more relevant stuff. Ultimately, players have to understand how games are going to change and evolve going forward. Despite the game not literally being a monthly subscription, it essentially is a monthly subscription.

It is Netflx. Things are added, things go away, and the money you are paying is access for what is currently there. Again, this was not spelled out years ago when this content was first purchased, hence the problem, but it is pretty clear now this is how Destiny 2 works going forward. This seems necessary, but in practice it is very weird in the entertainment space, and a situation most games have never had to deal with quite like this in the past but more likely will in the future.