This may seem a bit off-topic in some ways, but it's very relevant to the state of Destiny as of now, if a bit abstract. I'm 29 years old, and have been gaming for as long as I can remember. I love video games, my dad and I bonded by playing games like Starcraft, World of Warcraft, Halo, etc. Having a gaming career this long, especially with online games such as Starcraft and World of Warcraft, I've lived through a lot of downfalls in recent years, and for years I've been trying to figure out what happened, but I think I've finally come to a single, simple point. Video games are fun when passionate people make them. This point leads me to further questions, and even has me delving into psychological sciences to find answers. For example: 'Why is it that at some point, game developers just start changing things that don't make sense to most of the community?' or, 'Why does it have to change at all?' or, 'Why is it that the last few WoW expansions, Destiny seasonal content, League of Legends seasons, Halo 4 and 5 feel so stale?' This is when I come back to my point, which leads to the answer. "They're not passionate about it." Now, I can't blame them for that, and here's where psychology comes into it. Using the Big 5 model of personalities For a quick rundown: Extroversion: Whether you are energized by being around people or being alone Conscientiousness: How much you like work. Agreeableness: How easy it is for you to get along with people Neuroticism: Susceptibility to negative emotion Openness: Creativity and interest in ideas. For this topic, we are mostly going to be talking about Conscientiousness and Openness. Conscientiousness is split into two major subcategories: Orderliness and industriousness. What this means, is that if you are high in Orderliness, you like things to be clearly outlined, fit neatly into boxes, and things to be going according to plan and don't like change. High industriousness means that you can put your nose to the ground, work, and motivate yourself to work and get the task done. Openness splits into Interest in Ideas, the more 'intellectual' side of Openness, it's the interest in sharing ideas, hearing ideas, coming up with ideas and thinking about novel experiences. Creativity is well, creativity, it's the ability for you to come up with said novel ideas. There is [i]some[/i] inverse correlation between them, people high in conscientiousness [i]tend[/i] to be lower in openness, and vice versa. I'm sure everyone reading this can immediately come up with examples in their personal life of people like either of these. It's fairly rare that you'll have a combination of both, which is where you get people like Elon Musk, who goes out and creates something completely new and makes it work and keeps doing it. This brings us back to game developers and a large portion of gamers, especially those that have been playing them as long as I have. It was a novel field, completely new, which means that the low-openness types aren't going to be drawn to it. The tendency shows that means that the people drawn to both creating and playing it are people that are high in openness. Creative types have a need to express their creativity, which overrides their low conscientiousness for as long as they are being creative, but once it ends, that drive is gone. So we look at some of the great games of the past, and their stories. Halo: Started off as an RTS, you can see in the behind the scenes the passion and excitement that went into it, the sheer joy when they realized how fun the warthog was, and ended up making an FPS that defined not just the genre, but also storytelling in games to this day. Halo 2 was rushed, and we saw a lot of the issues with it, but then Halo 3 the Bungie of Old really got to flex their creative muscles, and they even admitted that they had essentially burnt all of their creative energies out on Halo 3, but, they still had one more game to make for their contract with Microsoft, which was Reach. Now, I know that many many people in the Halo community love Reach, but I have always found it to be a step backward. There were some cool things, I wish I could just import my Noble Six as a Titan in Destiny, for example, but there was something that always felt... Off, about the level design, enemy design, music, and storytelling, especially when you play Combat Evolved and Reach back to back like I have done recently due to the MCC being released on PC. However, the Reach behind the scenes spoke about how the reason they went back in time was so they didn't interfere with 3's ending, but primarily because they wanted an excuse to 'do something different' which they did, Halo Reach does not feel like Halo to me, so, mission accomplished, though I do still feel that they didn't fully get around their 'creative fatigue' with the franchise in it. World of Warcraft, same thing, my understanding reinvigorated by playing Classic WoW recently. The old Blizzard was full of passion about World of Warcraft, and nowadays, they're more passionate about the mobile games that they've self-admittedly been playing in their office instead of the games they make, unlike the Blizzard of Old, who made games that THEY wanted to play. No passion, they're just making the game for their paychecks. You may see the pattern here, passion dies, so does the game. Which leads me back to the subject posted as the title of this thread. I know that these companies are businesses, and businesses have needs, but I'm just trying to illustrate how that, and community attitudes, led to the current situation plaguing not just Destiny, but virtually every 'persistent multiplayer' games as I'll call them. From the business side of things: “Releasing one very good game every few years is scary because it's an inconsistent income.” and the Community side of things: “I'm out of things to do I want more content.” The solution to both of these problems that we as gamers have been subjected to for over a decade now, and getting worse and worse by the day is an all in one package: “Pump out regular content to keep players playing, make older content obsolete so we can keep making money off of them.” Which yes, it's worked, game companies have grown to monstrous sizes because of it with insane amounts of money generation. But, what's happened to the games as a result? What can possibly happen? You're taking your finite resource in your Creative department's literal neuro-psychological ability to put passion in the game, and forcing them to develop consistent content for years at a time. It's a two fold problem, both the Corporatization of the gaming industry, and the obsessive need for new content. The Corporatization problem, sadly, I'm afraid can only be solved by the market, by supporting smaller developers over, and not supporting well known, and sometimes beloved game companies. The Community problem, yes we can kind of work on. Nobody ever complained that there wasn't enough content in Halo CE, 2, 3, or even Reach. Yes those are single player games and not 'persistent multiplayer games' like Destiny, though that argument doesn't actually answer the question that I now posit. “What's wrong with putting a game down when you're done with it, and picking it back up when you're interest returns, or there is new content?” Well, I know some of the answer: Business: We can't make money off of you if you aren't playing. Community: If I don't keep up I'll fall behind. But the Community answer is caused by the Business answer... What do you all think?