What is important for a business? To have returning paying customers. Losing a player base i.e. returning paying customers hurts a game. And it did the first time around. Bungie sold 500 million copies at launch of D1 but had a huge drop in returning players so they worked hard to provide content. What happened is that when Activision saw that players were returning they decided to monetize the crap out of the game. People saw this coming with the first lootbox stuff in D1.