Sony acquires the Bungie studio (Destiny, Halo) to strengthen itself on the multiplayer game

And a major new acquisition in the world of video games – already the third since the start of 2022! This time Sony announced on January 31 that it had reached a definitive agreement to acquire the studio Bungie, developer of destiny and Destiny 2, and instigator 20 years ago of the series Halo, against the sum of 3.6 billion dollars.

The figure could almost seem skinny compared to the 68.7 billion dollars very recently disbursed by Microsoft for the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, or even the 12 billion put on the table by Take-Two for Zynga. However, in absolute terms, the operation remains massive: it is the largest sum ever committed by Sony’s video game division for an acquisition, far from the 229 million dollars spent in 2019 for Insomniac Games, or the 380 million for the cloud-gaming service Gaikai in 2012.

An independent subsidiary, free to create multi-media games

This is not an acquisition for the PlayStation branch like the others, insofar as Bungie is not going to join the other studios “first party” from Sony in the PlayStation Studios organization. Instead, the acquirer specifies that Bungie will operate as an independent subsidiary, with its own board of directors on which the studio’s current management team, including CEO Pete Parsons, will sit.

More importantly, Bungie will keep not only its creative freedom, but also and above all its ability to self-publish its games, on all the platforms of its choice. There is obviously no question therefore of withdrawing Destiny 2 Xbox consoles, PC or Stadia. But Sony and Bungie’s communication goes further by already stating that the studio’s next games (none of which have been announced to date) will not be exclusive to PlayStation consoles. Could this be a signal sent by Sony to Microsoft, which it would no doubt like to see adopt the same long-term strategy with a certain call of duty ? Probably not: this strategy was in all likelihood already chosen many months ago.

From Microsoft to Sony, via Activision…

This acquisition is not without symbolic significance, since the history of Bungie is intimately linked to that of the Xbox. Founded in 1991, the studio was bought in 2000 by Microsoft and became famous the following year by signing Halo: Combat Evolved, the legendary “killer-app” of the American giant’s first console. It was therefore largely thanks to Bungie that Microsoft managed to exist in the face of a PlayStation 2 of unparalleled popularity at the time, and thus to make its mark on the game console market.

Bungie leaves the fold of Microsoft and regains its independence in 2007, but the studio remains at work on the series Halo until 2010, and the release of the episode reach. That same year, the studio announced a ten-year publishing partnership with Activision, which would lead to the creation of destiny and Destiny 2. It is finally in 2019 that this partnership ends, a year before its scheduled end. Bungie then fully recovers the intellectual property and publishing rights to the license. destiny – which is therefore now part of the operation carried out with Sony.

Sony wants its place in the gaming market by live-service

The said operation is also obviously not unrelated to the success of Destiny 2. Multiplayer title designed as a “game-world”, constantly evolving since its initial release in August 2017, Destiny 2 is today one of the most remarkable successes in the field of multiplayer gaming in live-service — an area in which Sony, as a publisher, is currently absent. And Sony is counting on Bungie to help it invest in this space, whose value we know in terms of player retention and long-term revenue generation. This is confirmed by Jim Ryan, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, in an interview given to Gamesindustry.biz: “We could have launched ourselves [dans la création de jeux en live service, NDLR], but when you have the opportunity to have a partner like Bungie, who’s been there before, has the experience, learned the lessons, and has a brilliant team that can help us out… We think the the time it will take us to achieve something will be greatly reduced.”