As a concept, Games as a Service has been around for a decent while now, with the first game to fall under that umbrella that became commercially successful being Blizzard Entertainment’s (now Blizzard Activision) World of Warcraft MMO. Games as a Service is, to put it lightly, a game that requires a subscription (or, now, a one time fee) that has content released for it as the lifespan of the game continues that you buy to continue the experience. Some modern examples are Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s The Division, Valve’s Team Fortress 2, and Bungie’s Destiny and Destiny 2. These games typically have a base game and then the extra content is released as DLCs— in the case of Destiny 2, the most recent expansion to go live was Shadowkeep, a relatively expansive story DLC that featured the return of a fan-favorite location from the first game: the Moon.
Because that game is the most recent experience I have with a game that is considered a Game as a Service, that’s the example I’m gonna roll with here.
Destiny 2 offered players two choices at launch: buy an expansion pass and receive both the planned DLCs for year one and two, which were Curse of Osiris and Warmind respectively, or don’t buy them and effectively be locked out of that content until you buy it. They then did the same thing with the Forsaken expansion, but this one went slightly differently: buy the DLC, buy the DLC with the Annual Pass, or don’t buy it at all. These all were released individually for purchase, so let’s do some basic math.
The base game for Destiny 2 was $60, as all new releases usually are. To go with the cheapest possible option in all cases, we’ll say that this example person we’re talking about buys the version that comes with the expansion pass, which brings the total up to $90— so far, the total savings on buying the game and expansion pass is $10 (the base game being $60, the Expansion Pass being $35 alone, and the individual DLCs being $40). Now, let’s add on the cost of Forsaken at it’s cheapest cost (and without the Annual Pass, which gave players access to time exclusive Raids, Strikes, and other content) of another $40. That brings the current total to $130. Now, let’s add on the Shadowkeep expansion: another $35. Final total, if a player had bought all this content at release and at the cheapest price, is $165. Now all these expansions are larger, story-based expansion meant to be played predominantly as separate, yet additional stories to the base game— which justify the prices that the DLCs are sold for. Now, for comparison to a game that isn’t a Game as a Service from ten years ago now, let’s look at Rockstar Game’s Red Dead Redemption. This game came out at $60, was predominantly singleplayer oriented with a multiplayer mode that had some minor add-ons, each priced around $5 to $10 for non-essential skins, game modes, and horses for the multiplayer. The only story DLC that came out for the game was Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, which was a standalone experience that was sold $30 as it’s own game and $10 as an add-on to the base game.
Now, taking those two games by completely different developers about completely different things with fairly different gameplay, let’s take an analytical approach to the idea of Destiny 2 as a Game as a Service. Try saying that five times fast.
Undead Nightmare being released independently as a standalone story and game for $30 isn’t too outlandish— it’s similar to the situation with Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, as Rockstar wanted to make some form of singleplayer DLC content to get in on the success of The Ballad of Gay Tony and The Lost & The Damned expansions for their last title, Grand Theft Auto IV. In the case of Destiny 2, development for the game is still ongoing as you read this article in 2020 and the game came out in late 2017— 3 years for a FPS Game as a Service, which is still performing decently well in the sales department. In order for the game to continue, there has to be sales— hence why Rockstar’s latest iteration of GTA, Grand Theft Auto V, went the route of having microtransactions to support its ever-growing multiplayer component GTA: Online.
This whole article as been a rather long-winded and indirect way of stating the following idea:
Games as a Service has existed for a long time, but most games didn’t start adopting the model until they realized they could create more content (in the case of Destiny 2) and release it incrementally for a fraction of the base game price, rather than releasing a completely new and full game every single or other year. This (in theory) helps cut down on the intense levels of crunch that developers, writers, and other team members are forced to undergo to create all these projects— as well as help ensure a relatively steady flow of content that isn’t dependent purely on the sales of iterations of a game series that could be three or more years apart.
Here’s some solidly molten take for you that relates back to my conspiracy theory about GTA: Online and Red Dead Online from a few weeks back:
If GTA: Online had adopted a low-cost model for the expansions and kept microtransactions (similar to Destiny 2 with a cheaper cost per expansion), perhaps they would have been able to hire staff to take on both RDO and GTA:O without having to sacrifice the amount of content on one or the other.
Or maybe, just maybe, they could have made some singleplayer DLC for either RDR2 OR GTA V and I wouldn’t be nearly as salty about it…
C. B. Irby 