What do you think about Destiny 2’s imminent death and games as a service?
Before I go into my rant I would like to ask you: Have you played Destiny or Destiny 2? What are your thoughts on Bungie, the imminent death of Destiny, their push for Marathon, and “games as a service” in general?
As for my opinion, I think that the real problem is that (probably) most managers, CEOs, investors, and shareholders involved in live service games aren’t gamers. They don’t care about the quality of the games. A majority of them probably don’t even play what they publish.
What they care about is to maximize revenue with minimal effort, cost, and risk.
The programmers and artists suffer from low wages and job insecurity, and the gamers suffer from live service slop that eventually gets sunset even when it has a dedicated fan base (that could grow if the game was better).
We can’t win against this horde of managers, CEOs, investors, and shareholders. They got AAA in a chokehold, especially in live service.
We gotta continue to vote with our wallets and give our money to the companies who deliver quality games, and pull our money out when they don’t.
If Bungie dies, I’ll be sad because I have a long history with Halo (Combat Evolved, 2, 3, ODST, and Reach), but so be it. Something better may rise from their ashes.
We gotta resist the slop. It’s like fast food. We gotta resist it even if it’s addictive, and go get better quality grub elsewhere even if it costs more. If we keep eating the slop, they’ll continue frying more of it.
Edit: To make sure I don’t confuse anyone, I should add that Destiny 2 will receive one last content update this month, and will remain playable, just as its predecessor, for the time being. What I think most people are complaining about is that a game that could potentially be excellent, will be left in a messy state, designed mostly around maximizing revenue through micro-transactions, rather than offering a good experience. It has a large and passionate fanbase, but will basically abandoned by Bungie, in favor of their new game Marathon, which no one cares about
Going to be a bit more emotional since played Destiny on and off since Peter Dinklage listlessly woke us up in the Cosmodrome. We had a regular raid group that did Vault of Glass, Crota's End, Kingsfall and Machines Wrath all blind. Did Trails and Nightfalls religiously. Fought for god-roll gear. Sherpa for newer players. Got both my bothers playstations, copies of the game and PS+ when I left home so we could still play. And finished Rise of Iron thinking it would only get better.
Then, in spite of Destiny 2 being on the PC, it instantly felt like so much more of a chore. Forsaken and Last Wish were the last high points and Shadowkeep looked like it could carry that momentum. But Beyond Light and Witch Queen is where things started going pretty bad. I really should have drawn the line at Sunsetting content I paid for, or the over emphasis on Eververse, or the god aweful transmog, or the way PvP was left to rot. But my wallet kept being dragged back in.
There were plenty of bright spots here and there. But on the whole, it was simply a case where I could count on being let down with increasing frequency. And it was finally Lightfall that broke the camels back. Just deleted the game, sunk cost be damned. I even stopped watching Byf videos to keep up. It just wasn't worth it. Don't even know how Final Shape ended.
So yeah. After that, I just have zero patience for live service and MMOs. Even general PvP and co-op "friend slop". Destiny showed good enough numbers to supercharge the enshitification of premium online gaming. The idea, combined with Fortnight, CoD and Apex effectively killed countless other studios and promising projects, including Arcane Austin, Overwatch, Halo and a big chunk of Sony's unreleased First Party ambitions.
Just like Destiny, anything live service feels like waiting for a scrap of positivity in a deluge of bad business or poorly aging gameplay.
I would not be nearly as negative if I could boot up the game right now and have instant access to hundreds of hours of increble gameplay from over a decade of creative and community efforts. 95% of this work can exist as a single player, linear experience. I can't see any reason why this can't exist as peer-to-peer or through dedicated server setups that allow for people to curate their own experience. We've already had sensible looter style RPGs as far back as Diablo 1 and with the game going offline, there's no need to maintain the balance.
Last Christmas, I played halo splitscreen with my cousin and our kids. Got the AlphaRing mod, hooked up the pc to the big TV and spent nights going through Reach, ODST and multiplayer on 3. The same way I used to play with that cousin and our parents over a decade ago. It was just magical to have the whole family there and to see my kid go a little feral when we got that grav hammer.
I'm not going to show my kid how to Solo the Abyss or rag on my brother because he's never been able to outrun the flaming Servitor (it doesn't stop being hilarious to see him bonk the same cliff every bloody time). The infinite loot cave is gone. The Mythoclass, Bad Juju and Souros Regime that I dragged into every, even when it was off meta. No one will have a chance to reimagine the city factions or the criminally under used Last City (and even the Traveller itself). It's all just gone. And needlessly so.
After people paid for it. Thats probably the part I'm most salty about.
Dang. This made me emotional.
If you'd like a bit of a lighter story about the game. This was around Deep Stone and I was running it with my sibling and some friends. Warm up with the strikes and the whole way through, my bro is going on about how hes so hungry. We tell him to get some chow but he says he's good... then proceeds to wine about it all the way through the twin Oger fight.
So I get out my phone and order him delivery. In the form of random sides and extras from as many places that would allow it (add that it's a prank in the notes and people are surprisingly game). We had to wipe every few minutes because he had to go get 2 chicken wings and a handful of serviettes and a cup of ice and a can of bagle sprinkles and waffle toppings without the waffle and a platter of BBQ rib sauce over grilled peppers.
After the half dozen wasabi tubs, my brother threatens to dip and one guy does a flawless Zavala impression: "Guardian, are you abandoning the mission because you find your rations... unsatisfactory. And am I to understand that you find humble gifts from your brother in arms to be beneath you. Is that truly the conduct you wish citizens should expect from a Titan of the traveller."
We didn't even make it to the sorrow fight that night. Was it worth the money? No. But I was playing Destiny so that should explain where my head was at.
lol I didn’t even know such a prank existed. That story is hilarious. I’d say it was worth the money just to be able to tell it to your grandkids someday.
I have played Destiny 2 when it originally came out, if I remember. I think I actually bought it heavily discounted, a few months before going F2P?
I don't have anything against GaaS. I actually enjoy a few, and there is more than enough choice in traditional (non-GaaS) games for this to be a non-issue. As long as they're not pay-to-win, I'm fine with them.
But Destiny 2... that game is a damn piece of work. I tried playing it again a few years ago, and IMO it embodies the worst aspects of GaaS with overly complicated layers of gameplay, activities, currencies, ... I found it to be actively hostile to new or returning players. The fact that they removed paid content was also incredibly idiotic, because it means alienating new players who won't understand what is going on in the story, and casual players who might want to buy DLCs and play them at their own pace. They actively killed their playerbase, there's no other way to put it.
I said that in a previous thread, but I "want" to play Destiny 2. The game feel and loop are great, the gameplay is great, it's just an awesome shooter, but it's hidden behind layers of terrible decisions. I can't justify investing money or time in it when there are thousands of equally good games that don't want to milk me dry.
That said,
That's unfortunately the state of the whole gaming industry; most game studios just take contractors and/or lay off staff once their game is out, because that's it, there's no more work to do. But don't GaaS offer more stable working conditions? Destiny 2 came out in 2017, so that's 10 years of (more) steady work for many people.
I think that even in GAAS, studios rely on contractors and short-term employment a lot in order to cut costs, but I could be wrong.
Bungie, for example, laid off 220 “roles”, 17% of their workforce, in July 2024. More layoffs might be coming as the result of the end of Destiny 2’s development.
For anyone who worked on the game the entire time that it was being developed, who is now being laid off, this industry probably doesn’t feel stable. However, it’s (probably) true that this is the nature of video games and entertainment media in general.
We can’t expect Destiny to be there forever, of course, but the solution isn’t to lay these people off. It’s to give them new work to do. These aren’t seasonal agricultural jobs. If Destiny is ending, then start working on a new game and keep the people who have dedicated years of their life to the company around. They already have the experience too!
At the very least let them choose if they want to stay or move on.
I wanted to love Destiny, but the original lost me by the time I got to Venus. Way too many fiddly unexplained gameplay mechanics and dull "lore" that was little more than Generic Proper Nouns. I've checked in on the series once or twice since then, but the gameplay had shifted into complicated team-based raids and the lore had gotten even more bizarre and inexplicable.
Marathon looked intriguing from a design standpoint, but the gameplay ultimately sounded even more grindy and unforgiving than Destiny was.
If Bungie does go under, I'll of course be sad as a longtime Halo superfan (check the username!). But in a real sense the studio that made those games died a long time ago -- a few of the Grizzled Ancients may be left, but there's been such expansion and turnover since the aughts that the original crew's design vision has become something quite different. (I guess you could say... combat evolved.)
I just hope the new remake from 343 does the original game justice, but I fear they'll make a lot of the same mistakes as the original Anniversary from 2011.
It's not, at least not grindy. They've tweaked a few small things to make it even less so, but it's much much less of a stats shooter than destiny was.
Unforgiving, well yeah you lose your gear, although how much that actually matters is heavily debatable.
Yeah marathon is pretty easy to play casually if you treat it like a rogue-light and don't sweat the gear and unlocks much. I'd recommend coming in with a squad of people you know, I don't like playing with randoms and solo play is fairly sweaty although playing as rook can be fun.
Randoms can be really fun but I do wish you could just tag people you wouldn’t mind queuing with again without having to go full friends list.
Greed kills so badly so finding players who can take the win and gtfo can feel a lot more fun than “sure let’s dive NPCs and attract half the map”
Yeah my aversion to playing with crew fill is more of a social anxiety thing for me. I know some people don't mind but I can't stand it.
I do wish the game was tuned with pvp conflict in mind a bit less. As it is I rarely encounter other players in ways that are anything but instantly hostile because of how low the ttk is.
So, personally speaking, I prefer this. I dislike the awkward social contract of "so are we killing each other or not", and low TTK makes tactics and strategy way more important than gear and controlling recoil.
Getting a good jump on a better equipped player gives you a MASSIVE advantage because the TTK is low, as opposed to other games where you can generally identify you're taking fire, evade/take cover, and then re-engage with your gear advantage.
That said, I get it. A LOT of people want some sort of co-op/less murderfest/vs AI mode. I have to believe they're at least looking at it, because "just kill the NPC's" would drag a lot of people into this game. Even if it didn't get you gear or even unlock the same upgrades. They have the bones of something very very good here and i'm curious if they're eventually going to say "you know it wouldn't be toooo hard to make some decent PvE only content", even if its more like a minigame mode like CoD Zombies or whatever.
Yeah they've mentioned they're looking at experimenting with what they've called a "low pvp" mode this season. Also I think I saw the possibility of pve only but I'm not sure. The new night map certainly looks like it would be a good spot for a pve horde mode.
I do think that you're right about the advantages of a low ttk, and none of the different dials that they have are simple. It does seem like they're looking at feedback and being pretty responsive so I'm not unhappy.
I generally dislike games as a service in general. Even divorced of the shady business practices that seem to be common in the genre, it starts feeling like a chore to me.
I like games that release basically content complete. There's a fixed chunk of content and mechanics I learn as I progress through the game, and I can choose to master those mechanics as long as it remains fun for me. If I want more content, if there's a modding community, I can install mods.
I don't like live service games that add new content every six months that I have to read patch notes for if I want to continue understanding how the game works. I don't like taking a few month break and coming back to a fundemnrtally different game, or reminiscing about the good ol days when the game worked like x or y. I don't want to have to care about "the meta".
I think when you compare something like destiny or overwatch to something like Counter-Strike, it's pretty clear that a lot of people feel the same way.
Valve has added live servicey aspects to counter strike, like skins and whatnot, but they've resisted the urge to turn it into a flavor of the month style full blown live service game.
Counter strike 2 is largely the same game that I played in middle-school 27 years ago. AK is a one tap headshot, M4 isn't, save round after you lose pistol round, fake the defuse if the bomb is in smoke, etc etc.
Slight things like level design, weapon balance, graphics, sound design and so on have changed, but after not having played counter strike for 2 years, I'm confident that I could boot it up right now and know exactly what's going on.
Hell, you could give 14 year old me a copy of counter strike 2 and after the initial shock of being amazed by the graphics and matchmaking (I can scrim whenever I want, and I don't need to boot up IRC????) I'd feel right at home.
Big game companies seem to just focus on that endless live service faucet now, instead of producing more, smaller games that have a defined end time where they're considered content complete.
I think Destiny 2 had plenty of opportunities to keep growing, and seemingly alienated almost all of its playbase over the last two years especially, but there's honestly been so many years of corporate mismanagement at this point. They should've hired Seth Dickinson as a narrative director 10 years ago.
I fell off it ~10 months ago, with the release of Edge of Fate. I thought it was mediocre, but it came with an overhaul of all loot that finally killed it for me. Maybe the Portal and tier system was pushed by management just to have something different (similar to how Spotify makes constant UI changes), because it does feel like a change that sounds good if you don't have to use it.
The final update has me excited for Destiny 2 for the first time in ages. They're cutting out big chunks of the Portal, bringing back reasons to visit destinations directly, and they seem to be making high tier items much more common. It does feel like someone at Bungie is genuinely pushing for changes I agree with. If this update came out 8 months ago or earlier I think Destiny 2 would still be in active development.
As for live-services games in general, I was never invested in any others the way I was in Destiny, which was forever on the verge of being quite good. I certainly don't have any interest in Marathon, and I probably won't check out another Bungie project unless a Destiny 3 ever materialises.
I was super hyped for Destiny and played a ton of it because I actually had a crew to play with. Got Destiny 2 when it came out but didn't last to the first expansion. I was playing with randoms. Also, in typical fashion, I was burned out on multiplayer games and had less time due to work/being an adult.
Games as a service don't appeal to me anymore if they ever did. I can't dedicate the time but I also no longer enjoy the grind. My gaming time is limited and precious, so I save it primarily for SP games.
As for Bungie, when they bought themselves out from Microsoft, basically half the studio stayed to form 343 to keep working on Halo. I basically consider that the death of Bungie. At least the one I loved and have all the positive memories of. I enjoyed Destiny, it has great shooting, but it was grindy and soulless.
I played Destiny 2 very heavily for a couple years in the middle of it's lifetime (I was around for the releases of Beyond Light and The Witch Queen). It was a great mix of something that felt really fun to play moment-to-moment, had interesting worldbuilding/plot/lore/etc, and had a huge amount of quests and areas to explore. None of those things were unique, but I think the combination was rare and something usually only found in non-shooter MMOs.
After The Witch Queen there was a shift in gameplay design towards chasing specific "god rolls" of weapons, and that was the point where I felt that - for me - I was no longer the target audience of the game, and they were really optimising the game for the players who were spending a huge amount of time on the game. It wasn't entirely a new idea for the game, and they'd already sunset early campaigns by then I think, but that was the moment I fell out of love with the game and I started to lose interest.
I already had a running joke at that point that Destiny 2 was the best came I could never recommend as you couldn't start playing it anymore as you'd have missed most of the story - even if they'd not sunset the early campaigns, a lot of the story and content was "seasonal" releases that were only around for a couple months, and unless you made sure to play for most of that time you'd miss out on a lot of gear (I particularly cared about getting some of the cosmetics).
I don't regret the time I spent playing. I certainly got a lot of enjoyment out of it, and in hours-to-pounds it was money well spent. But I did still come away feeling like a bit of a sucker for having so much emotional investment in a game that was clearly made by a company that prioritised making money from consumers over making a good experience.
They didn't have to rely on FOMO (fear of missing out) and didn't have to do ephemeral seasonal content or remove older campaigns. I'm currently really impressed by Dune: Awakening, where the developers have listened to their community of players and made a first-class PvE experience in a game that originally pushed players into PvP, and recently announced an upcoming single-player mode (the game is usually played on public or private servers). Sea of Thieves also comes to mind, a game which I loved but has focused really heavily on a specific subset of it's audience and - in my opinion - alienated a lot of more casual players who aren't interested in PvP. It's a game that's fantastic fun without it, but if you play in the PvE-only mode it disables so many features of the game that it really feels like they don't want to.
To come back around to where I started, I feel like these things are tied together: once a company starts focusing on making as much money as they can from their consumers, they start to focus on a single audience, and games that originally attracted a broad audience get transformed into something that alienates a lot of their audience. It's not necessarily bad business, but it certainly makes for bad games.
I played Destiny 2 for a decent bit (I stopped before The Final Shape) and can unreservedly say that it has some of the most innovative and interesting raids in gaming. I've always really appreciated the fact that there's no "meta build", you can play with pretty much any build you can think of and, provided your general gameplay and aim are good, you'll still contribute a lot to the party.
That said, everything outside of raids has always been a bit meh. The story is terrible only because they deleted half of it so newcomers have no clue what's going on, the seasonal events are hit-and-miss (and, despite being limited-time seasonal events, they contain important story beats, even including major character deaths, which has always been one of the most bizarre design decisions I've ever seen), and the progression and reward structure can be really confusing. The gunplay feels great, but there's so much surrounding it that doesn't.
I wasn't surprised at all when they announced the end of development for Destiny 2. I'm honestly surprised it lasted this long since, at least from my perspective, the game doesn't really have much to appeal to anyone other than raiding enthusiasts, and that's not a large demographic.
So, I have no specific experience with or opinions on Destiny 2. That said, I search Reddit for posts with "update" in the title, and since the announcement, I've seen several about how this final update looks like it will actually be the best thing to happen to Destiny 2. They talk about how it's adding a lot of features that have been desired, removed or neglected, and they lament how these planned features likely would have kept the game alive.
The general sentiment in those posts echoes this line from your post:
And... Yeah, that's my general stance on the industry as a whole.
Game developers care about games, but in AAA, they don't get to make the final decision. So many games have been ruined by bad executive decisions. It's obvious with live service games because they'll force in incredibly intrusive microtransactions and various "features" meant to force active engagement like season passes, features which take up developers' time that could be spent improving the game as a whole.
It extends to the whole industry though. I remember reading an article about Telltale Games a few months before it went under, and it was a deep dive into how the person in charge became a heavy micromanager who wouldn't give developers any real say. I remember hearing how Deus Ex was forced by executives to be split into two games to maximize profits, leading to a sudden ending and incomplete narrative with that "sequel" still no where in sight. I remember an interview with a Pokémon developer about how they were forced to cut X & Y's development sooner than they expected because Nintendo and/or The Pokémon Company wanted to get the game translated into every language for a simultaneous global release. And so many games that were butchered or never saw the light of day.
Nearly every AAA game's problems can be traced back to executive decisions meant to fuel greed. Many of them genuinely don't get what appeals to gamers. They see only numbers and bottom lines, having no care for people's individual visions, and completely fail to understand what makes certain games so massively successful. They pour in millions into ideas that they think will make money because they see other games in that genre making a big profit, but they don't get that gamers will get bored of the same copy/paste formula. Games in over-saturated genres need innovation to stand out and succeed—and executives either see innovation as a gamble they don't want to risk, or they bet on the wrong types of "innovation" because they don't understand gaming.
With Destiny 2, the sentiment I see on reddit is that because the game is shutting down, the executives have completely stepped back. So the developers can finally release an update with the GOOD features that they know the fanbase craves, but which wouldn't have fit the corporate agendas to wring every bit of money they could from the playerbase.
I'm not personally opposed to live service games as a concept. There are experiences that can only be had in such games, so many tales of in-game events that can never be replicated. But executives need to let developers do their thing and stop injecting so much damn control. Or at least leave such decisions to people who actually understand gaming and gamers.
When Destiny was first announced it was announced as a “10-year project.” This was actually part of the complaint people had about Taken King being a paid expansion. It also cropped up from time to time as a generic complaint about the apparent lack of a plan. So it really just seems like their partnership with Activision expired and probably enough of the team turned over that they weren’t interested in maintaining it anymore. I reckon they were probably pretty keen on not having to work through Activision for their signature product line as well. Any opportunity to NOT have to rely on Activision to publish seems like a perk to me.
I mostly stopped playing during Taken King because the friend I usually played with unexpectedly died of the flu and it sort of stopped being fun without him. I tried Destiny 2 when it first came out but just couldn’t get into it. Running a game for 10 years and winding it down when it’s still well regarded seems, to me, to be preferable to just trying to pull a Simpsons and run it forever long after the point where anyone cares about it and it ceases to be culturally relevant. It is far better to sail into the West, bear your fond memories to the Undying Lands where they can remain ever green.
I know a few people in the industry and I just don’t think this is true. Basically everyone who works in the industry is a huge gamer, and if they recede from gaming as a hobby it’s generally because they’re too busy with work, family, and personal stuff rather than because they dislike gaming. As far as engineering jobs go it’s a very stressful, risky, and mostly poorly paid industry to be in. The only place where it’s maybe not as true is when you get to the very top of the C-Suites where you’re dealing with a lot more finance and law people. But it might be a news flash to some here, but there’s actually a LOT of people with MBAs or other professions in the business world and they are also pretty prolific gamers. This is a cognitive habit I wish people here and elsewhere would let go of, to assume that things not going how you would prefer is a result of everyone else with different preference mixes being either stupid or evil. I think what’s actually responsible for the disconnect is that the “gaming audience” that posts online is a fraction of the actual market of gamers, and they’re developing games to sell on the market rather than to the most online (and often irascible) fans. The priorities of people who buy games and the priorities of people who complain about the industry online are largely orthogonal to each other. Like it or not, the way the landscape looks is because this is what people voting with their wallets looks like.
It may well be that AAA titles—as we’ve gotten used to recognizing them—just don’t hold people’s attention anymore in the same way. I think that’s probably true and is driven by secular forces beyond the design decisions companies are making. Partly it’s market saturation and partly it’s greater demands on people’s time from streaming and brainrot apps, as well as a general cultural turn away from screen time in many of its forms. But if you’re funneling that kind of money into a project you’re obviously going to play it safe. Smaller, unproven concepts are riskier bets, so you bet smaller amounts of money to try them out and see if they catch. That’s what AAA initially meant, it’s a term that comes from bond markets where an investment that is rated AAA is considered to be extremely safe and stable. Riskier stuff that’s still probably an okay bet gets rated like A+ or Baa or something like that.
My short thoughts:
Destiny: I found the game boring, repetitive, and insufferable. I came from Halo CE and older shooters and having stats in my FPS games beyond a very low threshold still annoys the hell out of me, double so with looter shooter nonsense. ESPECIALLY when it affects damage and HP and by extension creates bulletsponges and TTK issues.
That said I respect that for an entire generation it was their Halo/CoD/whatever and as such was a huge deal, and I'm sad to see it go, even if in my eyes it's been on life support for so much longer than I expected.
Marathon: It's probably one of the best FPS games to come out in recent years and is going to continue to get kicked in the teeth due to a perfect storm of issues. The entire destiny fanbase hates its existence, a lot of misinformation about what the game is or isn't is making the rounds, and strangest of all...there's no good way to pay more for it?
The game is $40 (which is more than fair), but the season pass is basically only cosmetic (which is WILDLY FAIR in this day and age) and has a "cap" in that I don't think you can just keep throwing money at it.
I'm thrilled about this as I hate paying for power except in rare circumstances, but given this is supposed to somehow pay for itself, I don't see how they can make their money back with current sales and monetization. I'm waiting for them to fuck it up, but so far its honestly a steal if you like the genre at all.
I fell off of Destiny but I like having one or two GaaS on the docket at any time. The nice thing about GaaS is moreso that it has an ongoing community and an ongoing discussion. Something like RE9 can come out and generate a lot of discussion for the first week or two, but after that there’s nothing.
Today, I don’t really feel like there’s too many GaaS or that it’s something that CEOs are forcing or anything. There was a momentary explosion when people were feeling out how large the market really is, but with destiny 2 and many other falling off, it feels like the number is about right right now.
There should be a fair amount of live service games alongside single player releases.
Big Halo fan, own every game and have finished them all solo on legendary difficulty. I tried both Destiny 1 & 2 but I was already over MMOs by that time and I just don't like live service games as a rule. The gunplay felt great because duh, that's what Bungie does, but the rest of the game was not interesting to me at all. Because of this I have already made peace with the death of the Bungie I knew and loved years ago, so if they do end up folding it doesn't make any difference to me. I am only vaguely aware of the new Marathon game and my impressions are that it is Marathon in name only and nothing else.
To be clear, this is partially unfair, and I say that as someone who expected as much. Tonally it's very very much still marathon. Gameplay wise it's absolutely not marathon (more extraction halo than anything) but as someone who loved the original story it's so far managed to keep a lot of what kept that setting interesting and expand on it.
That's good to hear. Unfortunately the gameplay is more important to me and in this case is just not something I'm interested in at all.
I have never played Destiny 2. I'll only pay for service-type games if I anticipate that I'll get more out of that than I'll lose when they inevitably kill the service. I think others should to.
The only real problem I see with this is information access. I imagine that some people aren't actually aware of the conditions that apply to buying a game like Destiny 2, because the fact that they're services that could be shut down at any time at the whims of the publisher is buried somewhere deep inside a license agreement designed more for the publisher to avoid responsibility than to actually inform consumers.
With that in mind, Destiny 2 shutting down would have the upside of increasing consumer awareness of the risks of investing their time and money in a service that could at any point be shut down by its operators, so that consumers who don't like that will be more wary of it in the future.
Still, I imagine most people affected by stuff like this will happily pay for more such games. That is their choice and reflects their values as consumers. It's not for me to say that they should stop just because don't share my views on whether a game like Destiny 2 is worth the money. Maybe they don't mind that the games they enjoy end up being passing experiences that can't be revisited as much as I do. Maybe there are other qualities of these games that they enjoy so much that they outweigh downsides of the short lifespan.
It's certainly not for a lack of options that people buy service-based games. You mention AAA games, in response to which I'll say that it's to some extent these greedy (IMO) practices that afford such games the massive amount of resources invested in them. Smaller games backed by less resources generally also means fewer practical reasons to extract every possible sliver of return from them, because they'll compete with other smaller games that can afford not to. But you can't have the cake and eat it.
I've never played any Destiny games beyond an hour or two to see what all the fuss was about, or gotten into any live service games at all really (I'm a pretty strict single-player-only kind of person). But I do have extremely fond memories of Bungie. My first family computers back in the 90s were all Macs (first was a Mac Classic, followed by an LC 630, and finally a G4 Power Mac). Needless to say I was super jealous of all my PC-owning friends, because all the good games were either PC exclusives or took years for their Mac ports to come out.
Bungie was one of the few studios putting high quality games out for the Mac (either before a PC port or as Mac exclusives), one of the rare instances where (in my mind at least) my PC friends were a bit jealous of me. I bought big box copies of the whole Marathon trilogy as each game came out and sunk so much time into those. Felt kind of betrayed when they sold out to Microsoft, and as a result never really played any of the Halo games. And I have absolutely zero interest in the latest Marathon live service game, which makes me a little sad because I was so hyped about the Marathon franchise back in the day.
Sorry for the slightly off-topic response.
I never got that big into Destiny. The first game was a bit boring to me and I only got part-way through the campaign. Destiny 2 was a bit more interesting. I played with a German-American friend of mine when the PC port was released. We joined a clan led by a trans woman (I forget her name, we never really kept in touch) and cleared Leviathan up to the very last boss completely blind, not even looking at any tutorials and figuring it out entirely by trial and error.
As for Marathon. I was hyped at the initial reveal trailer, until I found out it was not a remake of the classic boomer shooter trilogy but rather a live-service extraction shooter wearing the skin of a dead Mac-exclusive franchise.
I fully expected Marathon to suffer the same fate as Highguard and Concord, but the player numbers are surprisingly healthy. And even Steam figures may be misleading as I'd imagine a lot of players are on PS5.
So the thing is, it's actually a shockingly fun game to play. On paper it sounds kind of awful but it's quite fun. It's got some stuff headwinds to face but I'm expecting it to continue to pick up new players unless bungo does something catastrophically stupid. Which would not be out of character for them as a studio, to be fair.
I only started playing Destiny 2 when Shadowkeep released, and then I put some 2000+ hours into it until Final Shape, which just seemed like the best time to stop. I had no former experience with Bungie games, not Halo, not even Destiny 1, so there's zero nostalgia involved in this, it's specifically about Destiny 2 and honestly, Bungie did pretty good for the most part.
Very, VERY few other companies can boast that they created a live service PVE game that wasn't an RPG and kept it going and highly populated with regular non-trivial content updates for over a decade straight. Maybe that was because their core gameplay wasn't as good, and Destiny 2's core gameplay is EXCEPTIONALLY good. Maybe they just didn't have the cash to burn, and Bungie has some magical means of tricking publishers into giving them lots of cash to burn despite their track record of, well, burning lots of cash. Maybe they didn't have industry veterans that sacrificed their entire lives' stores of passion to create a truly unique experience and were ultimately discarded once the company was mismanaged to the point of insolvency.
Ultimately I think Destiny 2 as a game will be remembered fondly, and most of the retrospective scorn will be directed towards piss poor management and an incredibly unsustainable content cycle (seriously 4 seasons plus an expansion every year is mind boggling amounts of work) and some very strange and perpetually idiotic design choices like vaulting story and PAID content. Destiny 2 may die, and Bungie may very well die with it (let's be real Marathon is not going to save them), but the memories remain. Watching raid races or trying to learn raids and dungeons blind, getting god rolls or exotic loot drops, posing with your friends with the absurd amounts of emotes for screenshots, getting destroyed in crucible, getting destroyed in iron banner, getting destroyed in trials of osiris, getting destroyed in gambit (I'm not big on the pvp lol), clearing a strike on grandmaster difficulty for the first time, and getting a proper and glorious finale to the Light and Darkness saga.
It was fun.