Another morning, another acquisition as Sony announced this morning that they are purchasing the once Xbox owned studio, Bungie (who later had ties with Activision) for 3.6 Billion. According to Gamesindustry.Biz , Bungie will remain a multiplatform studio following the final transition of the sale to Sony. They also appear to have the option to self-publish and reach players where they choose to play, ensuring fans that Destiny will remain that of a multiplatform franchise.
While Bungie had a publishing deal with Activision for Destiny, they left the publishing giant to take Destiny into free-to-play waters and have been pumping out paid expansions to further pack in additional content for its community, even at the cost of removing content. The studio is also working on a new IP, but details surrounding it are next to nothing at this time.
Jim Ryan, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, had this to say on the PlayStation Blog:
Today I am happy to announce Bungie will be joining the PlayStation family.
First off, I want to be very clear to the community that Bungie will remain an independent and multi-platform studio and publisher. As such, we believe it makes sense for it to sit alongside the PlayStation Studios organization, and we are incredibly excited about the opportunities for synergies and collaboration between these two world-class groups. I have spent a lot of time with Pete Parsons, Jason Jones, and the Bungie management team to develop the right relationships where they will be fully backed and supported by Sony Interactive Entertainment and enabled to do what they do best — build incredible worlds that captivate millions of people.
Bungie’s world-class expertise in multi-platform development and live game services will help us deliver on our vision of expanding PlayStation to hundreds of millions of gamers. Bungie is a great innovator and has developed incredible proprietary tools that will help PlayStation Studios achieve new heights under Hermen Hulst’s leadership.
According to the blog post, Ryan confirms a few things: Bungie will retain its status as an independent studio, and it will remain a multi-platform studio and publisher while being part of the PlayStation studios branding. Considering the price tag, this is a very rare deal that likely took several months to even prepare, let alone solidify into something real. For those thinking this is a reaction to the Activision deal with Microsoft, that easily is not the case as this sort of deal does not happen in two weeks.
As PlayStation has a long-standing history with producing high-quality single-player games, having a studio that is recently known for engaging with its consumers as a massively multiplayer experience, Sony now has access to a wide range of tools that are of Bungie’s own making and can allow their first part studios to take full advantage of, making this acquisition seemingly more about tech than content, given the fact that Bungie will continue to put games on Xbox and PC for the foreseeable future.
What are your thoughts about this deal? Does Sony finally have their Halo-killer in the making, or is there something else going on here? Comment below.