- Salazar14
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- Exalted Mythic Member
There are few questions/concerns on my mind. I suppose I'll start out with something that would hugely impact their game's success if it were an MMO. Michael Pachter, an industry financial analyst on Gametrailers, revealed a year or two ago that he had been in discussions with Bungie in which they expressed interests in subscription plans for their future products. As we've seen from the outcry from Call of Duty Elite, I truly believe that gamers will refuse to pay $5 in addition to their XBL subscription to play a game. If Pachter was telling the truth, Bungie adding a required subscription might kill their new IP. However, additional content for subscribers vs free players for a nominal $10 or so a year might work out better as we've seen with Bungie Pro.
Cross platform play would be essential to keep the game alive since, as we've seen with the XBL numbers, there is a much larger variety of games for gamers to play compared to Bungie's Halo 2 days. Having cross platform play for the Xbox, PS3, and PC would definitely extend the life of their IP for many years.
Another concern I have is with Microsoft playing ball with cross platform play. As we've seen with Valve, Microsoft is not keen to giving gamers free content which could be an issue for Bungie if they were to do cross platform play as everyone's speculating.
My biggest concern is with this generation of consoles. As we can see from Bungie's hiring ads, Bungie's making a game for the current console generation despite the possibility of new consoles being announced in the next couple years. Obviously this wouldn't affect the PC market (if Bungie's developing the game for the PC), but what would happen to Bungie's IP if it was stuck in the previous generation of consoles?
Bungie has a hard road ahead of them no matter what they do. It makes me wonder...
tl;dr- How will the possibilities of subscription based gaming, cross platform integration, lack of cooperation from Microsoft, and the next generation of consoles affect the longevity Bungie's next IP?