Acquisition wars continue in the gaming space. Sony today announced a massive studio acquisition which has it bringing Bungie into its PlayStation Studios fold. Bungie was responsible for the Halo franchise until 2010, after which it split off from Microsoft and has since developed Destiny and Destiny 2. The announcement comes only a couple of weeks after Microsoft revealed a $68.7 billion deal to acquire Activision Blizzard.
"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,” said SIE CEO Jim Ryan. "This is an important step in our strategy to expand the reach of PlayStation to a much wider audience."
Following the acquisition, Bungie will be an independent subsidiary of Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) headed by the studio's CEO and chairman Pete Parsons and current management team.
In a separate blog post, Parsons committed to the studio continuing to put out multiplatform experiences, adding that Bungie maintains full creative control and publishing independence of the Destiny universe. An FAQ for fans with burning questions regarding the future of Destiny across all platforms can be found here. To summarize, support will continue regardless of what platform players are using.
"We remain in charge of our destiny. We will continue to independently publish and creatively develop our games," Parsons added. "We will continue to drive one, unified Bungie community. Our games will continue to be where our community is, wherever they choose to play."
The studio also confirmed it has other games in development internally, and that these will come to other platforms without being PlayStation exclusive. Although, this could be a situation where these upcoming titles will hit PlayStation and PC and avoid the Xbox as a platform, much like how Microsoft does things with its first party games.
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