Over the weekend, I learned that Bungie is currently dealing with a lawsuit having to do with some of the story elements of Destiny 2. The Plaintiff alleges that Bungie stole his stories off of his wordpress site and used them for the Red War and Curse of Osiris plotlines that were featured in Destiny 2’s base campaign and initial DLC. It sounds like a stretch, but even if it is, Bungie, thanks to its own practices, can’t yet prove them false. Interesting, yes?

I couldn’t find out who exactly it is that’s claiming this, but it seems that they, whoever they are, are claiming outright plagiarism against Bungie for those stories. It seems dubious because, according to reports on site like Forbes, his claims are very broad and re- semble general concepts rather than unique plot points. There’s also the fact that he’s bringing this suit a full 8 years after the game shipped, so yeah, not exactly firm ground there. Bungie is almost certain to win this thing eventually.

However, for the moment, it seems Bungie cannot sufficiently prove their case. See, as proof, they submitted YouTube lore videos and Destinypedia entries to the court, and the court found this insufficient. Why did they submit this instead of letting the court look at the actual game? Because Bungie itself does not currently have the ability to show it to them.

Thanks to the company’s much maligned (and rightly so) practice of “content vaulting,” and the massive upgrades and changes they’ve made since taking the Red War and Curse of Osiris out of the game, they don’t currently have the ability to run an older build of the game. Like at all. They never did anything to preserve older gamestates or leave even themselves the ability to revisit them.

This, I think, tells us something very important: that “vaulting” is and was always a total crock. They introduced it with the promise of bringing stuff back later, but, not only have they never actually done it but they also apparently had no intention of ever doing so. So, yeah, between Red War, Curse, Warmind and Forsaken, players really did just lose out on all the money they spent on those experiences.

I think this case will also have something of an impact on GaaS (Games as a Service), in that it’ll potentially increase the cost of running such games and (hopefully), make them less appealing ventures in the future. In order to better safeguard themselves against (likely) frivolous lawsuits like this one, companies will need to spend extra money and resources to preserve older game builds that feature retired content. That likely won’t be appealing to many, but I guess we’ll see.

As someone who’s long felt left behind by Destiny and Bungie, it is honestly kind of amusing to see the company’s own nasty practices come back to bite it a little. I don’t think they’re in any danger of losing this and I don’t think it’ll hurt them all that much in the long run, but still. Anything that improves GaaS practices by even a little bit is a good thing in my book.

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What’s your take on this? How about “vaulting” or GaaS in general?

Image is a Destiny 2 Forsaken promotional screen shot