It’s not buggy or broken, at least that I can tell; it’s just an earnestly, needlessly terrible model.
Gears of War 4 has been dead for years now, but if you had the money and inclination, you could still go back and buy whatever skin or character you want, because The Coalition (and basically every developer with this kind of feature) had a really, really interesting idea: add something to the in-game store and just leave it there.
Compared to Halo Infinite, which is less than a year old and already has customization options that are gone forever. I’m not even talking about Yoroi-level content, because even that’s a thing where a limited release kinda makes sense; I’m talking about, like, basic visor colors. Or knives. Good gods, they even made HAZOP timed, and it’s HAZOP.
You can’t say you’re trying to expand players’ customization options and then make an extra effort to prevent people from accessing >95% of that content. Nevermind that it’s more or less gaslighting; it’s also just cutting out easy, guaranteed revenue for no good reason. And if you’re not gonna think about your community or your customer base, you should at least think about your income. Especially if the plan is to stick to the free-to-play model.
Yeah the store can burn in hell has far as I care, but by the Rings is it a horrible model. There’s some much stuff that was only available once or back before the Campaign dropped.
they are not “gone forever” as you suggest, they are just going to cycle the store items long term.
The reason they do this is a mix of the FOMO mentality (heavily encouraging people to spend money or else they may not see it for many months) and probably so they can gather data and have a better idea how to sell it later on. Something like the Cat Ears for example I cannot imagine them selling the same way, they’d probably increase the price on that sucker and put something else with it. Some store items sell next to nothing and so they should readjust the prices to increase the revenue.
There’s currently 189 bundles in the ‘back catalogue’. If they had to remove last Spartan standing because of the UI, they ain’t gonna be able to list everything in the store without changing the UI, that’s for sure.