Sony Entertainment announced on January 31 that it is acquiring Bungie for 3.6 billion dollars. Bungie is known for games such as the Halo series and Destiny.
Bungie, Developers of Destiny 2, Join the PlayStation Family
Playstation x Bungie
January has definitely been an interesting month for news. We’ve had month-long teases for games like Elden Ring. Furthermore, we’ve also had studio acquisitions such as the massive $68 billion Activision-Blizzard purchase that Microsoft announced earlier this month.
Now we have Bungie joining the ranks of high profile development studios being acquired by massive corporations. The acquisition was announced both on the official PlayStation blog as well as Bungie’s main website. It was reported that the deal is worth $3.6 Billion.
With this, Bungie joins the ever-growing list of first-party developers under the PlayStation Family. We now have developers such as Santa Monica Studios (God of War), Naughty Dog (The Last of Us), Guerilla Games (Horizon series) and Bluepoint Games (Demons’ souls remastered) within the same group.
Bungie to Remain Multiplatform
Join Your Friends Across Platforms
The announcement on the PlayStation blog was prefaced by the assurance that the studio will still remain an independent entity. It was also mentioned that Bungie will still continue to release games on multiple platforms.
Bungie becoming part of the PlayStation family is more about enabling the development studio to do what they do best – “build incredible worlds that captivate millions of people”.
“…it is clear their experience and skills are highly complementary to our own. We will be ready to welcome and support Bungie as they continue to grow, and I cannot wait to see what the future holds for this incredible team” stated Herment Hulst, the head of PlayStation Studios.
It looks like Sony Entertainment wishes to leverage Bungie’s ability to create innovative online features into their own games. Last year, Destiny 2 got cross-save and cross-play features that enabled players to break the boundaries between consoles. Players were able to transfer their saves from one platform to another seamlessly. Later on, Xbox, PlayStation, Steam and Google Stadia players were all able to group up together.
Thirty Years of Bungie
Halo Combat Evolved
Bungie is no stranger to great video games. The development studio has been around already for 30 years. Established in 1990, they focused more on classic Mac OS games. Eventually, they were acquired by Microsoft in 2000. It is then that they released the game that would arguably put them on the map of greatness – Halo: Combat Evolved.
The original Halo was critically acclaimed and widely praised. The game was revolutionary for its time, offering a great story as well as tight shooting mechanics. It is even what pioneered the current FPS trend that characters can only carry two weapons at a time and have regenerating health. Previously it was usually the case that players would need to pick up health packs to heal up. Now you could keep up the action as long as you didn’t get hit too much.
Bungie continued then to work on the Halo series. They went on to release Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST and Halo Reach. In 2014 they released Destiny on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox One. Just three years later they released Destiny 2 on even more platforms. They have continued to work on Destiny 2 ever since.
Major Acquisitions
Destiny 2
As mentioned earlier, there has been a multitude of company acquisitions lately. Microsoft has been on the hunt for great video game development studios. Obsidian and InXile Entertainment joined Microsoft back in 2018, bringing in games such as Pillars of Eternity and The Outer Worlds to Team Green.
Back in 2020, Microsoft announced that it was buying Bethesda Softworks and their parent company ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion. This now meant that Microsoft also owned IPs such as The Elder Scrolls Online and the much-anticipated Starfield.
Even more recently, Activision Blizzard and King also joined the ranks of Microsoft. Some beloved video game universes will now be part of the Microsoft Family, such as Diablo and Warcraft.
The PlayStation – Bungie acquisition probably isn’t Sony’s direct response to the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Deals as huge as these would take months or even years to fully plan out, let alone release to the public. The two studios probably didn’t create this deal in the 2 weeks since Microsoft’s announcement.
Controlling Our Destiny
Destiny 2 Gets Next Expansion on February 23
Bungie is currently most known for Destiny 2, its free-to-play first-person MMO looter shooter. While Destiny 2 isn’t technically an RPG, it does have a lot of RPG systems like skill trees, customizable stats and tons and tons of equipment that can change your playstyle entirely.
It isn’t clear what else Sony will get out of the acquisition of Bungie, aside from Destiny 2. As speculated earlier, it looks like the main drive for the merge is the technology and experience that Bungie has in creating online worlds.
Bungie also has an unannounced IP in the works, which it plans to release before 2025. There currently isn’t any more information on this unknown IP. The development studio will be able to ramp up its hiring with the new support from Sony. Hopefully, we can get more info soon.
For more news, check out Elden Ring New Locations, Classes and Bosses Revealed and Pathfinder Wrath Of The Righteous Console Launch Gets Delayed To Autumn 2022; First Story DLC Inevitable Excess Releases February.
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