Game On: Acquisition streak continues with Sony buying Bungie
Another week, another acquisition – Sony is buying Bungie Studios for $3.6 billion. I’ll be honest, I’m not keen on writing about acquisitions every other week as every big development team gets gobbled up by even bigger corporations.
That said, we don’t have to worry about any real monopolies forming any time soon – the major players right now are Microsoft, Take-Two, Sony, Ubisoft, Embracer, Tencent, Electronic Arts and Nintendo. Furthermore, Japan isn’t allowing U.S. or European companies to buy up their companies, meaning the likes of Nintendo, Sega, Square Enix and others are safe.
Bungie is best-known for creating Halo, but they voluntarily gave up the rights to that franchise in 2007 and quit developing Halo games altogether after 2010’s Halo: Reach. Meanwhile, their earlier franchises Myth and Oni are owned via a majority stake by Take-Two. Essentially, Bungie’s current intellectual properties are Destiny and Marathon, the latter of which hasn’t seen a new release since 1996.
Given their small library of IPs, $3.6 billion seems a bit high. But Destiny 2, initially released in 2017, has been an ongoing success – its sci-fi world is reasonably unique, and the marriage of magical powers with tight shooting mechanics makes for satisfying gameplay.
And while I found the gameplay loop to be tiring after a while, there are millions of gamers who don’t mind grinding the same missions over and over again. The hunt for new and exotic gear is never-ending in Destiny 2, and Bungie isn’t shy about asking gamers to shell out extra cash for access to the newest missions.
Moving forward, Bellevue-based Bungie is looking to form a studio in Amsterdam this year, and they plan to release a brand-new game unrelated to their existing IPs by 2025. The backing of Sony is sure to make those endeavors less financially straining for the developer.
Interestingly, Sony and Bungie have already confirmed that the buyout won’t be used to make Destiny 2 or other future endeavors exclusive to PlayStation. This is a bit of a surprise given Sony’s tried-and-true tactic of doing just that – when people choose PlayStation over Xbox, they often say it’s for exclusive AAA titles like the Last of Us or Bloodborne.
Similarly, weeks ago when Microsoft announced its intent to swoop up Activision-Blizzard for $68.7 billion, they confirmed that most franchises would continue to release on PlayStation, including Call of Duty. So why the sudden influx of acquisitions?
In early 2020, CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer said he was less worried about Nintendo and Sony and more worried about the likes of Google or Amazon. It’s a puzzling prospect given Xbox’s ongoing hardware rivalry with Sony and Nintendo, but Spencer is specifically looking toward cloud-based gaming being the future.
Google has Stadia and Amazon has Luna, two cloud-based gaming platforms with a whole lot of capital and infrastructure to back them up. But neither have caught on as popular methods of playing video games. While Stadia has graced many news headlines over the past few years – rarely in a positive light – I’d wager most people haven’t even heard of Luna.
All signs seem to point toward cloud gaming being the future, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s a solid decade away from being viable for most consumers. The idea of all the processing power being hosted on remote servers and streamed to your screen rather than a beefy computer connected directly to your display is a solid one, but the concept only works if your internet connection is absolutely excellent with zero hiccups.
Even people living in major cities have attested to debilitating input lag playing games via Stadia. If the likes of Google can’t make the concept work in ideal conditions, it’s a ways off. Regardless, it seems Microsoft would rather continue to compete with Sony than face off against the likes of Amazon and Google in the near future.
Sony isn’t as talkative as Microsoft, but this latest acquisition conveys the possibility that they’re willing to play ball with Microsoft to keep the bigger tech giants away from the video game space.
Riordan Zentler can be reached at riordanzentler@gmail.com.