SEASON OF OPULENCE, PART II: THE EVOLVING EVERVERSE
Last year, we thought long and hard about Eververse and how we wanted to change the strategy around microtransactions in Destiny. As some folks have smartly pointed out, MTX is a big part of our business being a live game. I'm not going to say "MTX funds the studio" or "pays for projects like Shadowkeep" -- it doesn't wholly fund either of those things. But it does help fund ongoing development of Destiny 2, and allows us to fund creative efforts we otherwise couldn't afford. For example: Whisper of the Worm's ornaments were successful enough that it paid [dev cost-wise] for the Zero Hour mission/rewards to be constructed (this shit matters!).
The storefront, which we launched alongside Season of Opulence is the first part of the strategic shift we're making with MTX. The decision to run old content in Bright Engrams instead of making new Bright Engrams is another part of the shift. We want to believe that our players would rather just buy things they like from the store. Earlier this summer, we detailed a bunch of the changes coming to Bright Dust and Eververse this fall (and if you haven't read that, go
check it out here).
The storefront is going to get another round of enhancements this fall, too. We're going to move it to the Director, so you don't have go to the Tower and see Tess to interact with it. We're giving it some Class specific content, so if you're on your Titan looking for Titan Universal Ornaments with smaller shoulders, you'll see Titan armor on one of the store's subpages. We're also going to make it so that the pieces you've already acquired from a given set reduce the Silver price of the set. For instance, if you are 3/5 Optimacy set on your Titan, the cost to finish the set in Silver will be reduced by 60%.
There are some other philosophies here that we haven't made explicitly clear:
We have made deliberate choices related to cosmetic items and not having them come from gameplay. Gameplay rewards are where you get items, power, mods, perk combinations, stats, triumphs, and titles. The aesthetics for armor blurs the line some – we want players to get cool armor from activities and the world that feel thematic to where they were acquired. Cosmetic items like universal ornaments, weapon ornaments, shaders, ships, sparrows, emotes, and finishers typically come from the store (There are exceptions, but generally speaking, that's how we think about this).
We are continuing to try and separate capability/gameplay from vanity. Armor 2.0 and Universal Ornaments are big parts of this separation. This is also why Finisher perks are mods that can be socketed into equipment, so that their aesthetic can stand alone.
As always, we welcome your feedback and thoughts.
