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Sony Strikes Back: Buys Bungie for $3.6 Billion

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Sony Interactive Entertainment and PlayStation logosMicrosoft bought out Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. The move, likely to ensure popular cross-platform franchises like Elder Scrolls (ahem, Skyrim) and Call of Duty become Microsoft exclusives, was unprecedented. It was the largest gaming company buyout ever, dwarfing the second place spot, $12 billion. It’s a deal that likely was only to stifle competition, and that’s gotten the FTC involved. Still, it became clear that, if Sony wanted to continue competing in the future, they’d have to nab up a few independent studios of their own. The belief was so common that share prices of independent studios skyrocketed in anticipation of Sony buying them. The gaming industry seems set to become a landscape with exclusives and limited consumer choice, and shareholders were ready for it.

Consumers, less so.

Now Sony’s set to buy Bungie for $3.6 billion. It’s a substantial amount, but far from the largest or even second largest acquisition of the year. Bungie, best known for the creation of Halo, a Microsoft exclusive series that launched the Xbox and remains Microsoft’s most notable exclusive game. Sony didn’t just strike back, they made it personal.

Bungie

Bungie has an interesting history. In the 90’s, it was known for games like Myth as well as Marathon, one of the first first-person shooters and the first to allow the player to look all around, including up and down, using the mouse. How far we’ve come. The game was exclusive to Apple’s platforms: the Mac, and the short-lived Pippin system. In fact, all of Bungie’s games were exclusive on the Mac. It wasn’t because of a deal with Apple, it just was what those developers preferred.

Then Bungie showed off Halo: Combat Evolved. Initially, the game would be multi-platform, though the company chose to reveal it at the Macworld Expo in 1999. A year later, before the release, Microsoft bought Bungie, making Halo an exclusive to the Xbox, and re-working the game. A port would eventually make it to the Macintosh, but it didn’t run as well as the original version, and was a poor copy (I speak from experience). Microsoft’s purchase killed off what could have become the Mac gaming industry, a move that feels all too familiar in the year 2022. They saw what the Mac could become with Mac OS X and popular games, and put a stop to it, using Bungie to launch their own gaming Goliath: Xbox.

Bungie split off from Microsoft in 2007. The company was still deeply tied to Microsoft, and would continue to work with the company to make Halo games, but Bungie would eventually become its own company again, free to work on whatever platform of their choosing. They made Destiny, a multi-platform shooter that defied genres.

Now, as Bungie expands to work on new projects, unrelated to their previous projects, Sony has snatched the company up.

Sony Acquisition

According to Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO, Jim Ryan, “Bungie will remain an independent and multi-platform studio and publisher.” For those worried that PlayStation, like Microsoft, bought the publisher to lock down their library of games, fret not. Sony says Destiny 2 won’t become an exclusive and won’t get any in-game exclusive items on the PlayStation. Future games may be exclusives, but Sony isn’t making any plans for exclusivity for any announced or currently released games. That’s at least some good news.

So if not for exclusives, why’s Sony buying Bungie? There are likely plenty of reasons that we can only speculate about, like a cold war with Microsoft using their multi-platform titles as leverage to keep their competitor’s products multi-platform. However, Sony seems to point towards Destiny 2’s online features, including their live game events.

Destiny 2 is a free-to-play game that blends first person shooter with MMO and RPG elements. It’s a unique and popular game, with similarities to games like Borderlands and Halo, and comparisons to other popular free-to-play games, like Fortnite. Sony’s catalog of its most popular exclusive games are largely single player games with epic storylines and gameplay, like Horizon Zero Dawn, Spider-Man, or God of War. Bungie can help them move into the Fortnite era, with live-service games and multiplayer. In fact, Sony says that over the next four years, they intend to launch more than 10 live-service games. These would make use of in-game purchases and currency as well as timed live events to make money, rather than a single price for the game.

All’s Fair in Love and Gaming?

At first glance, this seemed to be little more than a defensive move with some ironic history behind it. Sony grabbing up a studio to force Microsoft’s hand and keep more franchises on multiple platforms. It’s as though Sony just built some missile silos, pushing the cold war to go on longer.

However, the reality is likely more boring than that. Sony wants Bungie because they have experience making popular online games and, through Destiny 2, games featuring live events. Sure, Bungie made Microsoft a competitor in gaming, and Microsoft buying them likely pushed Apple out of the gaming market permanently. But to Sony, it seems they’re just another company that makes something Sony has little experience in, but sees profit potential in.

It’s not the console wars we expected, but that’s a good thing. We have a bit longer until every game is an exclusive and consumers need three systems to play more than a third of the games on the market. However, at the rate these companies are buying up competitors, I don’t think it’ll be for much longer. These are unfathomably large companies, some buying up would-be competitors and others just gobbling up companies to harm the competition. It’s market consolidation and that’s never good for consumers.

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