On Monday, Sony interactive game developer Bellevue, Washington, will join the popular online game. The $3.6 billion deal will enable Bungie to establish a partnership with Playstation studio.
After Microsoft announced a $68.7 billion bid for Activision Blizzard earlier this month, this can be seen as Sony’s obvious counterattack.
As early as 2001, Bungie was the studio behind halo: Combat Evolved, which promoted the success of the original Xbox; Now, an older and bigger Bungie is working for Microsoft’s only real competitor in the console field.
This is not as shocking as the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, but it is difficult not to compare the two, both in history and in the talent of each company. Together with Activision Blizzard, Microsoft controls many of the largest first person shooter production companies in the modern game industry, making Bungie the last large FPS independent game company. Now Sony has.
Related reports: Sony will buy the former Microsoft studio Bungie for $3.6 billion, which is the latest blockbuster video game deal
This may be the beginning of a new large-scale M & a cycle in the large video game industry, as smaller players either unite to survive or try to make themselves more attractive to potential buyers.
Although 2021 is a strange year for the video game industry, it is also a very profitable year. According to NPD group, the total consumption of video games in 2021 increased by 25% to 45-64 years old. As an area, video games have been very big, but the pandemic makes them bigger. Even the production delay and hardware shortage in 2021 can not completely break this momentum.
By this time last year, we had seen a huge contraction among game publishers, developers and tool manufacturers, with hundreds of companies changing hands, from small game developers to creators of toolkits and utilities. This trend is driven by the influx of venture capital, the increase of income and the company’s preparation for the development of the next generation. With the transaction of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is likely to trigger another similar acquisition frenzy. No one knows which company will be sold next.
Bungie further clarified that the terms of its transaction with Sony did not involve the change of leadership; Bungie will “continue to publish independently and creatively develop our games” and intends to hire more employees to continue its current expansion.
Bangui wrote on its official website: “in SIE,” we found a partner who unconditionally supports us. He hopes to accelerate our vision of creating cross generational entertainment while maintaining the creative independence beating in Bungie’s heart. Like us, Sie believes that the game world is only the beginning of the development of our IPS. ”
In my opinion, the money motto here is “the game world is just the beginning.” Since the launch of internal Playstation productions studio in 2019, Sony has been actively integrating its video game franchise into other media in the past few years. Its current projects include the live action film “unknown”, played by Tom Holland as Nathan Drake, and HBO Max’s TV show based on “our last”, both of which are scheduled to premiere later this year.
This means that Bungie will continue to develop destiny 2 as a multi platform game, including Xbox, but it may try to expand the destiny universe to other media (there are “animation series” in the whole scene, really) which will be handled by Playstation productions.
Bungie does have another project under way. This is a new IP, which previously said it would be launched in 2025. If any of its games are unique to the Playstation platform, it is likely to be this one, although it is too early to make more irresponsible guesses. Fortunately, I like this.
Even so, it is unlikely to mark a new chapter in the traditional game console war. Sony has recently explored bringing some of its large-scale exclusive Playstation games to PCs through steam, such as horizon: Zero dawn, Ares and lost days, and Microsoft’s interest in exclusivity has been unique in the past five years or so. Now, the three main players seem to be closed in their own unique sphere of influence.