I paid $60 for Destiny 1. Then $60 for Destiny 2. Then Bungie went free-to-play and handed the whole game to new players for nothing.
No loyalty discount. No early access perk. No acknowledgment that day-one players kept the lights on while they figured out their business model. Just — here you go everyone, it's free now. Thanks for funding the experiment.
And the worst part? We kept paying anyway. Season passes. Expansions. Eververse microtransactions. Silver. Because the game was good enough that leaving felt worse than staying — and that's not an accident. That's the design.
That's exactly how the live service loyalty trap works. Developers don't need to reward the players who paid the most. They just need to keep the game good enough that walking away feels like your loss, not theirs. Destiny 2 perfected this model for nine years.
Now Bungie has announced the final update — Monument of Triumph drops June 9, 2026 — and the players who paid full price at launch in 2017, who bought every expansion, who funded this franchise through its roughest years, are getting the same goodbye as someone who downloaded it for free last week.
This isn't just a Destiny 2 story. It's the live service playbook. And if we don't name it, it'll happen again with the next game we love.
Did you get burned by a game going free-to-play after you paid full price? Drop it in the comments — I want to hear which game did it to you.
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