Insomniac I can understand. The company has a lot of history with Sony.
Bungie is puzzling. Frankly, I’m not even sure what’s there to buy. All they got is Destiny that’s a pretty so-so game popularity-wise.
Who else has Sony bought?
Bungie is puzzling. Frankly, I’m not even sure what’s there to buy. All they got is Destiny that’s a pretty so-so game popularity-wise.
Who else has Sony bought?
Secondly, most of those game studios already have a close relationship with Sony, they can be considered 2nd party, and mostly make PS games. Sony’s competitors aren’t losing out much.
P.S. Frankly, I don’t think Sony ever intended to be in the game development business - they are a hardware company. There is a pattern to the game developers they buy - almost all of them are “tech wiz” developers; i.e. optimisation gods while gameplay of their games are usually so-so. The raison d'être of their acquired studios are to showcase the power of their hardware and coincidently provide development tool chain feedback as well as development knowledge which Sony’s “ICE team” will then share with other developers, not compete with their 3rd party developers.
That said this might have change in recent years as exclusives become a differentiator for their console.
The PlayStation all started with Ken Kutaragi who worked in Sony’s digital research labs. It started as the “Play Station” a CD addon for the SNES. But due to contract disputes Sony got dumped for Philips in a very public fashion - probably Nintendo’s biggest mistake ever. Sony went ahead on its own and created the “PlayStation” (aka PS1 today) and the rest is history.
Don’t see where Sony Music comes into the story.
Sony purchased Bungie to essentially teach them how to make successful live service games, not for the IP. They hold so much power inside PlayStation studios that they, as per the recent The Last of Us factions leaks, review and determine if a multiplayer title meets their requirements for success (factions didn’t).
I don’t think it’s a good thing (as I personally disapprove of the way Destiny operates & see a focus on these sorts of games from Sony as a major blunder) but the business logic of the purchase is obvious.