Sony officially acquires Bungie in a deal worth $3.6 billion
- ByStartupStory | July 16, 2022
Sony has completed its acquisition of Bungie, the game developer of Halo and Destiny. Both firms confirmed the news on Twitter on Friday, acknowledging that the $3.6 billion transaction went smoothly. While it is a significant sum for a relatively small firm, the deal was small enough to avoid the antitrust investigation that Sony rival Microsoft generated with its planned $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
Bungie may not be as large as Activision Blizzard, which distributes everything from Overwatch to World of Warcraft to the Call of Duty mega-franchise, but it is positioned to have a significant effect on Sony’s near-future gaming plan.
Bungie will stay a standalone game studio at Sony, but its skills will be incorporated into the company’s plan for PlayStation Studios, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s division committed to developing tentpole videogames that highlight the company’s technological prowess. Sony has huge ambitions for a slew of live service games – online multiplayer games that sell virtual items and expand over time, typically billing players set monthly charges for access or special benefits.
Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan stated in a May investor presentation that the firm intends to allocate 49 percent of its PlayStation Studios development expenditure to live service games by the end of 2022. Sony intends to launch and manage 12 of its own in-house live service games within three years.
“The strategic significance of this acquisition lies not only in acquiring the extremely successful Destiny brand, as well as major new IP Bungie is currently developing but also in incorporating expertise as well as technologies Bungie has evolved in the live game services space,” Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki said shortly after the Bungie acquisition was announced.
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