Bungie

Destiny 2 is in uncharted territory these days as it attempts to sell players on its new “Annual Pass” model which will give out smaller content updates over time for $35, spread out over the course of 9-10 months or so before the next big expansion hits in the fall. While so far I think it’s proving to be worth it, many other players may remain unconvinced.

Destiny’s other monetization avenue is the Eververse store, but at this point the shop has been through so many iterations that it’s now at the point where I genuinely cannot fathom why anyone would need to spend money on it, as if you have a little patience (which I often don’t) you can probably get 100% of the items you want just through playing to get engrams or buying stuff with duplicate/dismantled bright dust. In short, I just can’t imagine this brings in that much revenue for Bungie/Activision, though I am certainly not suggesting changes be reverted to make the store worse and less generous like it used to be.

What I am suggesting is that Bungie finally makes an effort to pursue a monetization avenue that players are practically begging for, and have been for ages.

It’s time for Bungie to open up an easily profitable form of cosmetics, character redesigns and the sale of additional faces, hairstyles, scars, face paint, exo uh, horns(?) all of it.

Bungie

One of the weirdest parts of Destiny 2 when it launched was that its character creator was pretty much identical to the original game’s, despite being released three years later. And when characters were being ported over from Destiny 1 to Destiny 2, players were not given the opportunity to alter anything about their appearance. And even those making new characters, it’s often the case you change you mind about how they look later, especially as many designs can look way worse in the cold light of day than they did in the selection screen (I swear my Awoken warlock has an entirely different in-game face than the one I picked).

How would this work?

For starters, give everyone a free redesign token for each character. This will let people fix things they’ve been wanting to for years, but also introduce them to new, paid cosmetics. After the first redesign, future edits could possibly cost silver.

Then you’d simply introduce a cosmetics shop. There are not a ton of categories of stuff you could sell, given that we’re only talking about faces and heads here, but there are all the items I mentioned above, plus other potentially profitable new additions like beards, eye patches, piercings, etc. All of these new, non-standard additions would just cost flat silver. This would be entirely separate from Eververse (which needs a total overhaul anyway). No loot box engrams, no bounties, no bright dust. Just….you want this hairstyle, it costs $3. Want that face paint? $5. Simple, straightforward and profitable for a certain core group of players who are desperate to make their Guardians look better than they have for the last 1-4 years.

Bungie

This would likely not be as profitable as say, Fortnite skins, given that in the third person shooter you’re seeing what you bought all the time by looking at your character. All this “face stuff” can only be seen in your character menu, in the tower, or in a few cutscenes, though I think it would be in Bungie’s best interest to make a lot more cutscenes where the player’s face can be seen to spotlight all the cool new additions you could buy.

Why hasn’t Bungie done this already? The likely answer is that Destiny is not built with the most…flexible of tools, so it’s probably the case that there are significant technical hurdles to overcome to override the “hardcoding” of character creation which locks it in for the rest of the game and makes it unable to be changed, similar to how that works in games like say, Mass Effect, but dissimilar to maybe, Saints Row, which let you change even your voice, gender and race once the game had already started (ideally, the option to change race and gender would be nice here too, since there would finally be say, good-looking human options to choose from, though all my characters are locked-in as Awoken).

But while I understand that this would probably be a big technical obstacle to overcome, I do think that it’s worth devoting some resources to try to figure this out. A portion of the community has wanted something like this for years now, and it could end up being a significant source of revenue for Bungie to please their Activision overlords. Convince one player to buy a couple $5 cosmetic upgrades for their character and voila, you’ve essentially sold them a $20 DLC without actually having to make anything but some face paint and a virtual beard. To me, this seems worth investing the time to figure out the “character editing” problem that appears to be preventing this from being in the game.

I care about Destiny making money because I want this to be a profitable series that has a long and healthy life. And if this can be done by introducing a feature that a lot of players want, and doing so without loot boxes or price gouging, that seems like a win-win for everyone. But I’ve been saying this for years, and we haven’t seen one iota of movement, so I suppose I shouldn’t hold my breath.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Read my new sci-fi thriller novel Herokiller, available now in print and online. I also wrote The Earthborn Trilogy.

Get the best of Forbes to your inbox with the latest insights from experts across the globe.