Destiny Free-To-Play? Maybe That's Not Such A Crazy Idea

You can find articles or blog posts all over the Internet pondering whether this game or that game should go free-to-play. I browse them occasionally -- sometimes for informative purposes and sometimes for entertainment -- but rarely report on them. Today, though, I wandered into a piece about a game I'd never considered as a F2P candidate but that would make a fair bit of sense.

Over on Forbes.com, Dave Thier postulates that Bungie's Destiny should make the jump to F2P. He argues that the base game is already heavily discounted, to $15.89 on Amazon for PS4 (though he doesn't notice the $14.31 price tag for Xbox One), so he figures that it might as well go F2P to serve as a loss leader to get more people playing and possibly boost expansion sales.

It's solid reasoning and not unlike what ArenaNet did with Guild Wars 2. The base game for that was often discounted as low as $10, and it went F2P just before the expansion came out, offering all vanilla content for free, adding two million more players, and, in theory, boosting expansion sales. As Thier notes, Destiny already has microtransactions and free content drops, so it's pretty much F2P in all but name (and price tag) only.

Perception would probably be Destiny's biggest issue, though. Games that go from paid to F2P are often seen as "failing" on some level, and while Guild Wars 2 has mostly avoided that label, Destiny's had a rockier go of it. Also, free-to-play games have a harder time being accepted on consoles. Even if it made all the sense in the world to go F2P, would/could Bungie pull it off?

It's an interesting thought, though, and one that I wouldn't be shocked to see pick up steam next year. If you haven't tried Destiny yet, would a free-to-play move get you to check it out?