Sony is buying Bungie

And the acquisition wars are officially on.

I don't play Destiny so this doesn't affect me but things are getting interesting/scary.

As an "independent subsidiary" (whatever that means) putting out multiplatform games.

Hmm.

Kinda strange, since they'll apparently remain a multiplatform thing.

Been awhile since Destiny 2, and there's already a road map for new content there. Curious if this will result in something brand new or just a bigger budget for current plans?

Still not a huge fan of consolidation, but I don't think this is as big as MS gobbling up Activision in it's entirety. Also interesting how Sony is clarifying up front that Bungie will be 'independent' and multi-platform.

Does Bungie have anything going on other than Destiny 2 right now?

... Is Destiny 2 still good?

Bungie, who?

@mindbullet: This is not nearly as big as Microsoft buying Activision, but Sony can't do anything that big because Activision is almost half their market cap. It would be a merger rather than an acquisition at that point. For perspective based on market cap this is about half a big a move as the Activision merger proportionally, though in real dollars it's obviously about 5% as big.

Activision is staying multi-platform too for the time being but in both cases it's just a non-binding short term statement of intent right now (though Activision has actual contracts for at least 3 years with PlayStation) rather than anything long term and binding. It's hard to see this as anything other than a consolidation move for the coming streaming war. Why else would Sony bother?

Sony doesn't even have a Game Pass competitor so there's no reason to worry about Destiny being on Xbox (though I imagine it will leave Game Pass if it hasn't already) but owning the studios allows the parent companies to make the right moves in the right strategic situation. At the very least it makes sure that Destiny and whatever else is next for Bungie will stay in the PlayStation ecosystem.

Well i guess they have there FPS developer now. Destiny always played great, but there DLC situation has been a mess and has made me never want to play that game again, then they "improved" it with the vault. So if i end up with "free" Destiny 2 DLC on Sony platforms i might give that game another go. But i highly doubt that's what will happen, unless this gets put in project Spartacus. Otherwise i have basically written that game off. But I do want to see the next thing Bungie makes, even if its not necessarily a FPS.

Now this Ladies and Gentlemen is a real console war we're witnessing. This makes the spat between Sega and Nintendo during the 16-bit wars look like two school boys throwing dodge balls at each other during recess. Though, it seems like Sony did this out of desperation and not a carefully calculated move like Microsoft. Time will tell.

@av_gamer: I doubt this was a desperation move. These deals generally do not come together in 2 weeks, at least not unless they've had talks earlier. It's possible, I guess, but Sony has been making strategic acquisitions for a while now. Insomniac. BluePoint. The timing of the announcement might be in response to Microsoft (and most importantly the massive drop in valuation that Sony had after that deal) but I would guess it was at least being considered for longer than 2 weeks.

There's another tweet thread with a bit more detail. Deal has been in the works for a few months now, and Sony is already saying to expect more acquisitions. I guess we're all in on AAA consolidation now.

One thing I've always admired about the "Playstation Studios" concept is that the big dogs are often helping out with every big game in the portfolio. Like you hear about Santa Monica Studios visiting Naughty Dog to learn their camera rigging and motion capture systems, or Guerilla giving hands on tutorials to Kojima Productions on their Decima engine - and KojiPro coming back with their own ideas - during the development cycles of Horizon and Death Stranding. It'd be fairly unprecedented but I think it'd be neat if Guerilla and Bungie did a kind of co-production on some kind of FPS property with a regular campaign and some multiplayer attached.

Anyway, I tried to reinstall Destiny 2 for the third time to enjoy it on PS5 and...man, there is just way too much going on in that game at this point. Celestial star horses, at least three new materials to manage, about 1/4 of the content was locked behind Beyond Light (or seemed like it was) and then if I want to get into Witch Queen it's really unclear on a cursory Google search, or looking at the product page on PSN, whether Beyond Light will be included or still an additional $30 on top of the $100 it seems you'd want to spend to get the actual repeatable content out of this expansion...not only is it exhausting, Destiny 2 secretly got pretty expensive. I wonder how if at all Sony will interact with this side of things - probably not at all because it's probably pretty successful for Bungie, right?

"Bungie put Xbox on the map".

MLB The Show, a Sony developed game, is on Gamepass and the new one was just announced as being a gamepass game as well. Additionally, Bungie has already said that their upcoming games will be multiplatform and nothing will change for Destiny. It's also said that Bungie will continue to self publish their games. It's really a weird purchase, but it seems like a key sticking point for Bungie with this deal was that they retained a lot of control over their direction, and apparently Sony agreed to it.

Destiny 2: Our Shared Vision > News | Bungie.net

Q. Will the Destiny 2 experience on non-PlayStation platforms be impacted by Bungie becoming part of PlayStation? ​

No. We want to maintain the same great experience you already have on your platform of choice. ​

Q. Bungie has future games in development, will they now become PlayStation exclusives? ​No. We want the worlds we are creating to extend to anywhere people play games. We will continue to be self-published, creatively independent, and we will continue to drive one, unified Bungie community. ​

@ll_exile_ll: MLB is on Game Pass because Major League Baseball is the publisher on Xbox and they controlled the rights. The game is only out on Xbox because MLB wanted it there as part of the licensing agreement. This is similar to Deathloop being a PS5 exclusive because Bethesda signed the contract before Xbox bought them. It doesn't mean the same thing will extend to future contracts negotiated by Sony subsidiaries.

People say a lot of things when deals are closing. For now Destiny 2 is staying on Xbox (just like Call of Duty is staying on PlayStation for now) but that doesn't mean the same will be true for Destiny 3 or Destiny 2 5 years from now.

These are long term strategic acquisitions and nobody spends $3.6 billion if they're not going to leverage the acquisition for their related business in some way. We don't know what that will look like long term and we won't for awhile, but I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the statements being made now, which are all pretty vague and short term. Saying that "future games in development [now]" won't be PlayStation exclusives could mean a lot of things. It might mean they're coming to PC (as many Sony games are starting to) or it might mean that the next couple games will be multiplats or it might mean that they come out multiplat but are on Sony's version of GamePass for free like Psychonauts or Minecraft Dungeons (A Mojang game made under Microsoft that was a true multiplat.)

But we don't know from the current line of corporate statements, and you don't spend $3.6 billion for no reason.

Who owns Oni and Myth? They’re both probably been out of Bungies hands since forever, right? I seem to remember a non-Bungie produced Myth prequel(?)…

A modern take of the Oni concept could be really cool, part stranglehold, part mirrors edge with a lot of kung fu combos and slick disarming moves. But Sony 100% bought them for FPS:es. Who owns Marathon these days?

I wonder how they've been doing since going independent? Maybe this is a way to scale up a project they've had in the works.

John Halo's Marathon of Destiny.

@panik: Myth is owned by Take-Two. They published Oni so they might own it as well.

Microsoft will buy Valve next

@shindig: I've been perusing the Destiny subreddit a bit, and it seems like people are fairly certain limited time emotes alone can pull in nearly seven figures in sales. A light Google shows that in August of last year Bungie announced they'd had 20 million new players since transitioning to a base model of free to play (though honestly Destiny 2 may be the least free free to play game ever made lol). It sounds like this roughly amounts to more than 30 million potential players of Destiny 2 at any moment, though obviously many of them are lapsed players or didn't like what they saw when they launched the game.

They're charging $40 for this upcoming expansion but the most value (and actual additive features to gameplay) appear sequestered behind the $100 edition. So even if you were gonna be highly conservative and estimate maybe 8 million people buy that at full price, and let's just call it $70 to go full bore on armchair financial analysis, you're talking $560,000,000. And then come back to those emotes and other cosmetic items that against any rhyme or reason appear to be doing quite well for Bungie in the eyes of the players who pay the most attention to such things.

@emospacemonkey: I think this is a joke but there are two reasons why that's unlikely. The first is that I think Valve is privately held and uninterested in being purchased.

The second is that it would create serious monopoly concerns on the PC gaming side. Valve actually helped Microsoft from a regulatory perspective by being a major marketplace on PC that they don't control. Obviously there are others but Steam is the big one, and as long as Microsoft can point to it and say "we don't own that so we're not anything like a monopoly" that is a compelling argument.

There's a reason that Microsoft saved Apple from bankruptcy in the 1990s.

Weird purchase but makes sense, feels like it could be a good fit for both parties. Even if this deal has been in the works for some time, one can't just ignore the feeling that this is retaliatory. I have no doubt that they want to remain multiplatform, but they can use Destiny as a bargaining chip. Call of Duty goes exclusive (and none of that Game Pass on Playstation talk), so does Destiny. One thing's for sure, Sony will make that purchase price back sooner than Microsoft will.

According to what I read, the deal to buy Bungie has nothing to do with Microsoft's decision to buy Activision.

With that mindset, I think buying Bungie makes sense because Sony needs the FPS expertise. Sure there are the Killzone games from Guerilla and the Resistance games from Insomniac but I don't think either of those franchises are groundbreaking shooters.

Sony's strategy seems to be to focus on buying talent rather than IP. They bought Bluepoint because of their excellent remasters and Nixxes for their PC porting expertise.

Bungie is the biggest strumpet of developers at this point.

What? I didn't expect this to happen, for Destiny, to me it's an okay FPS but I still prefer Halo though.

this seems like a shrewd acquisition. if the big boy corpo's want that GaaS money, Destiny and thereby Bungie seem in the best position to iterate. they clearly have learned a few things since launch, and if their next product is in fact another shooter with Games as a Service as the model- it seems they have as good a shot as anyone of getting it the most right (relatively).

A pretty weak "acquisition" considering that all Bungie games will still come out to Xbox. Sony needs to be more aggressive in their acquisition game if they want to win this war. AND Sony needs a 1 to 1 equivalent of game pass.

Xbox honestly offers a much better customer experience. It's hard to compete with game pass and Sony aren't even trying.

I guess Sony can include the contents of whatever ongoing game Bungie decides to do next into their subscription platform and force people to pay a monthly or seasonal fee on other platforms. Other than that it's a bit more difficult for me to connect the dots on this one. Has Destiny been so profitable for Bungie to warrant the sale price of $3.6 billion?

@isomeri: That's how I was feeling after reading this news. Bungie has a long running name for sure. But the last couple years it's been all Destiny. I'm not much of a fan of Destiny so for me it's just hard see a $3.6 billion purchase being worthwhile. I hope they pump out some new ideas sooner than later.

I think a lot of people don't realize how valuable service games really are, Destiny 2 is still one of the most played games on console 5 years later with 60k concurrent players on steam.

Bungie is also an absolutely massive studio 600 with a very lucrative IP, to put that in perspective Bethesda Game Studios 400 and Id Software 200 and that's just supporting one game.

Bungie could easily be making 200-300m a year without releasing any new content.

Folk....you' all know that this was a move that was symbolic, not useful, right?

They used this as a counter to Micrososft, not because what Bungie has matters - they don't matter in 2022. Destiny flooping do hard proved they are not much use. Yet, Bungie is still a symbol. They are the compnay that Microsoft "used to have". Bungie is the daddy of Halo - that is their worth. Sony is purchasing them and giving them complete freedom, is because Bungie doesn't matter except as symbol.

This is like Sony playing a mind-game with a middle school Frienemie. They did what was akin to asking their frienemies girlfriend to the 8th grade dance. Hey, Phil we're smooching your old girlfriend who dumped you...and even better she is in on the joke smirking at you too.

@castiel: Give this a read:

https://gamingbolt.com/new-game-pass-subscriber-number-report-raises-questions-about-services-long-term-viability

Game Pass is not the "slam dunk" the gaming lay person thinks it is, nor are streaming services licenses to print money; far from it.

Subscriber numbers will probably fluctuate with new releases. That's how I treat TV. If something big hits like The Last Dance or Chernobyl, I opt in for a month and then bounce. Some people might treat gaming that way.

Are we suddenly living in the 1800s or is this some new Internetspeak I've missed? Either way, nice.

Looks like The Rock is going to be busy. As soon as he is finished starring in "Call of Duty the Movie" he will have to start shooting Sony's "Destiny 2 the Movie".

Not sure about big acquisition, but I wish Sony and Microsoft would buy some indie studios too.
Microsoft at least did buy Double Fine.

@emospacemonkey also The Rock is busy auditioning for Joe Rogan Experience https://news.yahoo.com/joe-rogan-shown-support-dwayne-151347242.html

@sub_o: Housemarque ~80 isn't that much bigger than Double Fine ~60 and thats the smallest studio MS bought.

You can argue Sony's got a more diverse showing under their umbrella. Bend, Media Molecule, Housemarque, Santa Monica, Digital Polyphony, Naughty Dog, Pixelopus, the other Japanese studios, etc. Microsoft's acquisitions have been all western focused and feel a lot narrower in scope.

@sub_o: Disappointing. Thought for the Rock it was all about family

@isomeri said:

Sony didn't buy Bungie because Destiny 2 is a world-altering mega-hit (it's not), they had their own reasons, but they didn't get a terrible deal. $3.6B is a lot of money but not outrageous when you consider what Sony needs (A competent FPS developer, people who have experience running a service game, etc). Sony didn't buy them to lock up Destiny, they bought them because they cover a lot of Sony's blind spots.

But just for fun - there was a leak a while back putting microtransactions at ~$150M/year in 2020. They sold 1 million preorders of the new expansion, which basically goes between $80-100. Activision sold for ~8x revenue, 3.6/8 = $450M, which I guess is possible (I would have guessed $350M) but of course Sony has more information and again, they might value Bungie higher for other reasons. Point is, it's not completely outrageous.

*anecdotally, I see a fair amount of Stadia players in the tower, so they do exist! Go figure.

People have to trying to push that narrative that Destiny is dead and a flop since the series began, over 7 years ago.

Reality Check:

Most Popular MMOs - MMO Populations & Player Counts (mmo-population.com)

Happy to see Sony come right out and say it today; I was beginning to feel a little crazy the way people kept talking about why Sony would pay for Bungie as a product provider when it was so clear this was about infrastructure.

https://www.polygon.com/22914172/sony-playstation-bungie-acquisition-new-live-service-games

“The strategic significance of this acquisition lies not only in obtaining the highly successful Destiny franchise, as well as major new IP that Bungie is currently developing,” Sony executive deputy president and CFO Hiroki Totoki said in an investor presentation (via Eurogamer) broadcast on Wednesday, “but also in incorporating into the Sony group the expertise and technologies that Bungie has developed in the live-game service space. We intend to utilize these strengths when developing game IP at PlayStation Studios as we expand into the live-game services area.

“Through close collaboration between Bungie and PlayStation Studios we aim to launch more than 10 live-service games by the fiscal year ending March 31, 2026.”

Come to think of it, perhaps the new partnership could lead to Bungie getting more resources for Destiny 2 so some of that vaulted content can be playable again.

That would be nice. That would make the $100 or so that I spent on the base game and some expansions for more worth it than just barely, even if it is as unlikely as Bungie assisting Guerrilla in remastering the Killzone series for PC; buy hey, a man with an effeminate alias can dream.

@ll_exile_ll:

That's something that bothers me with all the games I like and play for long. Some always say "it's a dead game" but it's not. You still get new ways to improve in it or speed runs or smart ways to overcome difficult spots...

after the acquisition is done Bungie said

"the most immediate change you will see is an acceleration in hiring talent across the entire studio to support our ambitious vision."

I wonder if this is because important devs left or if they just want to expand for bigger projects?

Probably the latter. They've hired Bungie for their expertise on making service games so some guys could move across as support staff on other projects.