By Jamaal Ryan
Just a few months ago, Destiny was more of an idea than what
you’d expect from a game that was said to have a $500 million dollar budget
behind it. Destiny’s relevance was solely based off of the name of the
developer behind it rather than tangible footage or press previews that
explicitly illustrated what Destiny was all about.
“I don’t know what this game actually is” was a quote I heard
over and over again for the past year. Sure its strike mission gameplay reveal
was at Sony’s 2013 E3 press conference; sure there was a dev diary on the competitive
multiplayer, but neither showed anything all that novel or interesting, which
was concerning coming from the studio that’s largely responsible for the
shooter genre on home consoles as we know it.
Then came the Destiny alpha which changed many opinions of
the press and fans alike. “I don’t know what this game actually is” quickly
changed to “I’m a believer”, paralleling their experience to milestones such as
Phantasy Star and Guild Wars 2 mixed with Halo and Call of Duty. It was a
springboard to begin a real discussion for Destiny.
Today marks the second day of the Sony platform Destiny Beta,
and word is all over the gaming community. Getting into the beta might have
been a bit bumpy, but Destiny works, it’s deep, and it’s fun.
While gamers look to toil around the Crucible battle grounds
and the decrepit Old Russia for the next week, Activision is watching their
experiment take its course. Seeing games like Watch Dogs and Wolfenstein do so
well on new hardware is a strong indicator that system owners are hungry for
games to play. The Destiny Beta couldn’t have hit at a better time, with literally
no major game releases in its beta window. In fact, Destiny will be the first
major release outside of Metro Redux after the beta closes next week. This helps
keep Destiny in the conversation as the beta will be fresh in the minds of many
gamers by the time September 9th rolls around.
The beta also ostensibly clenched many sales of the game
through preorders. Gating beta keys behind required preorders, the beta asks
for players to buy in before trying. And while it reeks of the preorder bonus
nature that the industry has gone in from Alien Isolation’s Crew Expendable to
what we might see from GameStop getting involved in game development, what the
Destiny Beta has to show off is impressive, perhaps impressive enough to ignore
that we’ve fallen right into Activision’s plan.
With no major release between now and September, and likely
a high volume of preorders, Activision’s marketing strategy for Destiny is tactful
and seemingly effective thus far. Bravo Activision.
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