Destiny 2 is going to raise the price of its season passes from $ 10 to $ 12.
As reported by GameSpot, this price raise starts with Season of the Deep, the first immediate season coming up. This price change will not affect players who bought Lightfall or Lightfall + Annual Pass Edition. Basically, if you bought the big bundles from the start, your investment is fine.
But of course, this is also the first price change coming to Bungie’s game after they were acquired by Sony. While Sony seems to have allowed Bungie to stay independent in their decision making, it doesn’t take away their ability to influence Bungie’s own decisions.
This move also follows Bungie’s recent actions in the courts against a set of cheat makers and leakers. The company very recently won a suit against VeteranCheats.
In the month before that, Bungie warned cheaters that they would start using software to detect them while playing in the game. Bungie also revealed that they had outed a Destiny leaker, who also happened to be an influencer and streamer for the game.
While Bungie’s Destiny 2 is now free-to-play, its income lies now in those season passes. This will be the first price increase that will be felt in the game for quite some time.
Bungie is not exactly doing this from a place of strength. In spite of their successes in going after cheat sellers and leakers, Destiny 2 players haven’t been happy with the game so far.
In fact, just last month, Bungie shared a blog post where they essentially apologized for Lightfall failing to meet their goals as they had intended so far.
Bungie said:
“With a solid amount of data now under our belts, it’s clear we missed the mark on some of our goals and needed to make updates based on constructive feedback.”
Fans will definitely not be happy with these changes, but with the increasing number of $ 70 games, and even Niantic raising the prices of the Remote Raids on Pokemon Go, it seems that Bungie will take whatever drop in players they get and keep going.
It seems unavoidable that inflation is the unmentioned factor in the rise in game prices, to match the rise in costs of game development.
For what it’s worth, we don’t know right now if and by how much Sony influenced this price raise. If Sony sees that this compromised the viability of their acquisition of Bungie, they may have compelled this.
But it is just as likely that Bungie decided to do this themselves to meet their own profitability goals. In any case, we will find out soon enough if the years long community of Destiny 2 players will bolt, or keep playing and paying more.
