Bungie, Bellevue, wash game mechanism manufacturer Sony interactive entertainment (SIE) has officially acquired the development studio behind the franchise of video game destiny.
According to the US $3.6 billion transaction terms announced on January 31 and ended on July 15, Bungie joined the Playstation studios network as an independent subsidiary of SIE. It will retain its previous management team and executive committee, and Pete Parsons will continue to serve as CEO.
This makes Bungie cooperate with other Pacific Northwest studios, such as packer punch Productions (sly Cooper, ghost of Tsushima) in Bellevue, Valkyrie entertainment, a support studio in Seattle, and days gone, a studio in bend, Oregon.
According to the tweet of Bungie’s official account on Friday morning, Bungie’s current project Destination 2 will continue to be available on platforms other than PlayStation.
Parsons said on twitter that the acquisition was “a big step forward” and that the company’s vision was “to make Bungie the best place for anyone in the entertainment industry to work”
In the past six months, bungee jumping has been frantically recruiting. Although it recently announced its commitment to the remote first working environment, it plans to continue its planned office expansion. It currently accepts applications from a total of 24 states in the mainland of the United States.
The new deal marks Sony’s intention to change, and the company plans to rearrange its development priorities in the next three years. According to an investor in May, Sony hopes to operate at least 12 live broadcast service franchises on Playstation before fiscal 2025. Jim Ryan, CEO of SIE, specifically mentioned that Bungie’s expertise in this field was one of the drivers behind this acquisition.
Bungie had previously announced in early 2021 that it was developing a new intellectual property right. At that time, it said it planned to bring any possible intellectual property rights to the market “before 2025”. Sony’s repositioning and this acquisition showed that, like destiny 2, this new project would also be a live service game, or an exclusive game console of PlayStation.
The last extended version of Destiny 2, the witch queen in February, was produced entirely through remote work. It is reported that this is the most pre arranged extended version in the game’s nearly five-year history. According to independent population tracking, D2 has more than 40 million users and about 774000 players every day, which is enough to make it one of the world’s top ten online games.
At this point, the most interesting acquisition can be said to be Sony’s change in direction. Sony’s Playstation 4 is undoubtedly the largest seller of the previous generation of game consoles. One of the important driving factors is Sony’s first-party library games, most of which are large but limited experiences for single player players. These include 2018’s God of war, our last second part, death stranded, Marvel’s spider man, and this year’s horizon: forbidden West.
However, these games are not cheap, fast or easy to make, especially when the studio “crunch culture” is attacked by all parties. The naughty dog, a developer of tlou2 owned by Sony, has been subjected to special scrutiny. Employees are forced to work around the clock for months in order to complete the game on time.
This summer, the entire video game industry is also facing challenges. During the 2019 covid-19 pandemic blockade in 2020, the number of viewers of video games increased sharply, and most of these viewers seemed to stay where they were.
However, the supply has dried up. Surprisingly, there are few AAA video games that really hit the shelves in 2022, and many of them show signs that the plot arc stops, the ending is sudden, and the gameplay without modification is affected by COVID-19 in some way. The only exception is the dark fantasy game Elden ring, which easily outsold all other games this year.
Therefore, Sony’s solution to this bottleneck seems to be to use Bungie to help it shift priorities. I’ve written about Sony’s ninth generation game console before. It seems that its strategy is not to repair what hasn’t been destroyed, but now it is predicting the next “supply shock” by refocusing its exclusive library on games as a service. This is a risky move, but as usual, it will depend on the quality of the game.