Sony acquires video game studio Bungie (Destiny) for $3.6 billion

The great maneuvers continue in the video game. In early January, the publisher Take-Two announced the acquisition of the mobile game studio Zynga for 12.5 billion dollars. Two weeks ago, Microsoft revealed the acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, the largest Western publisher of video games on consoles and PC, for 69 billion dollars. This Monday, it’s Sony’s turn to shop. The Japanese group reveals to buy the American studio Bungie for 3.6 billion dollars.

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This check may seem much less impressive than those signed by the competition. But here, Sony gets its hands not on a publisher with several production units, but on a single studio. Bungie leads the license destiny. His last opus, Destiny 2is an online game available on PC, PlayStation and Xbox, and whose content is regularly updated with expansions.

A studio that worked for Microsoft and Activision

The history of this studio is amusing in view of this acquisition. Because at its origins, Bungie belonged to… Microsoft, for which it created its most famous license in video games: Halo. Bungie remained under the hands of Microsoft from 2000 to 2007, before taking its independence while continuing to produce two sequels to Halo exclusively for Xbox consoles.

Then, in 2010, Bungie signed a ten-year agreement to create a new license on behalf of publisher Activision-Blizzard. This is the license destiny. This marriage was not a happy one and the two parties divorced in 2019. Bungie was able to take over the rights to destinyand self-published its license.

So it’s hard not to smile when you see a studio closely linked to Microsoft and Activision being bought out today by Sony. But this acquisition does not mean that Destiny and future Bungie productions will become exclusive to PlayStation consoles. “We will continue to self-publish and be creatively independent“, underlined the studio on its site.