Sony completes $3.6B deal to buy Bungie
engadget.com
engadget.com
"Through close collaboration with Bungie and the PlayStation Studios, we aim to launch more than 10 live service games by the fiscal year ending March 31 2026."
https://www.ign.com/articles/sony-playstation-to-launch-more...
Gran Turismo 7 which has nothing to do with Bungie is already full of microtransactions, and it's not even a F2P game https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/gran-turismo-7s-mic...
I quite like the GT games and haven't bought it simply because it's $120+ in Australia. When it comes down in price, I'll check it out.
But I just can't get past the content treadmill anymore. Life got busy enough that I can't keep up anymore, and losing access to old stuff sucks because it means going back to the game is that much higher of an overhead for me to re-learn.
It also would be very challenging for me to be excited for the future knowing it might become worse, and the current golden age will be completely removed and inaccessible.
In terms of old content being lost, the only part I'm actually quite annoyed at is the sunsetting of old weapons. The Forsaken campaign and all that stuff, I don't care about as much. To me the part that stings is that if I worked hard to get The Recluse, it should still be useable to this day.
I believe Elder Ring was a successful and profitable game, but because it's a one time purchase game, the developers probably don't have much of a reason to keep further developing. Economically speaking, they'd probably focus on expansions or sequels - anything that they can sell and put bread on the table.
Where was with GaaS you can keep working on the game.
Kind of like Tesla cars, where they don't have year 2020 model but instead whenever you're buying one you're always* getting the most "up-to-date" version.
Sony owns PlayStation.
This is the Bungie that made Halo. Yes, Microsoft owned them at one point, but sold them 15 years ago.
> After showing the game at the Macworld Expo, Bungie was mobbed with interest and orders for the game. The game was not finished until December 14, 1994; Jones and a few other employees spent a day at a warehouse assembling boxes so that some of the orders could be filled before Christmas.[24] The game was a critical and commercial success,[27] and is regarded as a relatively unknown but important part of gaming history.[29] It served as the Mac alternative to DOS PC-only games like Doom and System Shock.[16] The game's volume of orders was unprecedented for the studio, who found that its old method of mail or phone orders could not scale to the demand and hired another company to handle the tens of thousands of orders. Marathon also brought Bungie attention from press outside the small Mac gaming market.[24]
He is also on Twitch, where he streams NetHack (and other stuff): https://www.twitch.tv/matthew_colville
>In 1999, Bungie announced its next product, Halo: Combat Evolved, originally intended to be a third-person shooter game for Windows and Macintosh.
>On June 19, 2000, on the ninth anniversary of Bungie's founding, Microsoft announced that it had acquired Bungie and that Bungie would become a part of the Microsoft Game Division. Halo would be developed as an exclusive first-person shooter title for the Xbox.
>On October 1, 2007, Microsoft and Bungie announced that Bungie was splitting off from its parent and becoming a privately held limited liability company named Bungie, LLC.
>In April 2010, Bungie announced that it was entering into a 10-year publishing agreement with publisher Activision Blizzard.
>Bungie terminated its publishing deal with Activision in 2019, after eight years; as per their agreement, Bungie retained all rights to Destiny and will self-publish future installments and expansions.
>Bungie announced a major expansion of its firm in February 2021. In addition to more than doubling its headquarters space in Bellevue, Washington, Bungie announced plans to open a new studio in Amsterdam by 2022.
>On January 31, 2022, Sony Interactive Entertainment announced its intent to acquire Bungie for $3.6 billion. ... Both companies stated that the deal would not affect platform availability or exclusivity for Destiny 2 but instead was geared towards media beyond video games that Bungie had been interested in pursuing for some time.
Microsoft paid a good sum of money for them before, and then they got spun off, and had successful runs with Destiny, and I'm sure the Activision partnership was lucrative, and now Sony buys them straight for 3.6 Billion USD.
Only Carmack has had this kind of success I think.
That not withstanding, 50 million is very good, but was actually yes, less than I expected, taking that on face value
Never played them, though so I do not know how similar they actually are.
Bungie's aversion to being owned stems from their Microsoft days, when they yearned to be free from having to make Halo sequels.
However, the reality is that game development is expensive. Destiny doesn't have a monthly subscription fee, so the income for the studio drops dramatically between paid content expansions. It's tough to keep that going without outside support, given the cost of creating said content.
(Obligatory disclaimer: I work for a division of Activision, but these opinions are solely my own)