Opinion: Destiny 2's 'content vault' locks gamers out of missions they paid for

Bungie has made it no secret that part of the reason this is done is to keep the game's file size down — at its largest, 'Destiny 2' occupied a whopping 165 gigabytes on peoples' hard drives. — Bungie

I've written at length about the "games as a service" model before, wherein video games are continually updated with new content every few months. One of the longest-running examples would be World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game initially released in 2004 that continues to receive content updates to this day. Games like WoW and Eve Online pioneered the space with their subscription-based sales model.

Such titles were popular with hardcore computer gamers, but had little appeal to more casual players. In recent years, games like Fortnite and Destiny have managed to introduce tens of millions of gamers to their continually updated gameplay model. Some games are even free-to-play — but development teams have to eat, and publishers have an even more voracious appetite, so the true price comes later down the line.