Sony is paying $3.6 billion for the acquisition.
Hot on the heels of Microsoft’s blockbuster acquisition of major video game developer and publisher Activision Blizzard, their chief business rival Sony has announced that they’re making a major acquisition of their own: Bungie, original creator of the Halo series and current creator of the online game Destiny. Sony will be acquiring Bungie in entirety for a $3.6 billion price tag.
“We’ve had a strong partnership with Bungie since the inception of the Destiny franchise, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to officially welcome the studio to the PlayStation family,” says Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan in an official PlayStation blog post.
“I want to be very clear to the community that Bungie will remain an independent and multi-platform studio and publisher,” Ryan added, explaining that Bungie will “sit alongside the PlayStation Studios organization” rather than working directly under it.
On their own blog, Bungie explained that Sony will be “a partner who unconditionally supports us in all we are and who wants to accelerate our vision to create generation-spanning entertainment, all while preserving the creative independent that beats in Bungie’s heart.”
Bungie will still retain independent authority over what games are published on what platforms, which makes sense, as Destiny 2‘s entire framework exists across PlayStation, Xbox, and PC platforms, and could not be disentangled from all three easily.
