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Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal

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Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal

#101

Post by er4hn »

HWR_14 wrote: post #88
015a wrote: post #77

Outside looking in, this feels like a far more valuable acquisition than Activision for $69B. Call of Duty is valuable, but Microsoft has already said they don't intend to remove it from PlayStation. That could change, but so could CoD's importance to the video gaming industry as a whole: its popularity has dropped with essentially every release since BLOPS2. Outside of CoD: AB is a shadow of its former self; IMO the…

Microsoft didn't buy Halo. They bought Bungie, then used them to make Halo. They spin them off, keeping then Halo franchise. Okay, technically Bungie was working on a RTS game called Halo when MS bought them, but it was after the purchase it shifted genres and found its groove. In other words, this "echo" isn't really what you are saying.

Halo was an FPS and a spiritual successor to an earlier series of theirs called "Marathon". The main characters, weapons, and themes of the original game all skew very closely to Marathon.

Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal

#102

Post by w4rh4wk5 »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #97
HWR_14 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft didn't buy Halo. They bought Bungie, then used them to make Halo. They spin them off, keeping then Halo franchise. Okay, technically Bungie was working on a RTS game called Halo when MS bought them, but it was after the purchase it shifted genres and found its groove. In other words, this "echo" isn't really what you are saying.

Halo was most certainly an FPS before MS bought Bungie. https://youtu.be/ebI5lkLRTdg

True, but it was initially supposed to be an RTS, just a bit longer before Microsoft stepped in.

Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal

#103

Post by steveklabnik »

HideousKojima wrote: post #13
glanzwulf wrote: post #10

Capcom? Konami? Sega? Nah, let's buy this 1 old ass game. Hope Bungie has something in the works that is 3.6B

Does Bungie even still own the rights to their older catalog (not counting Halo obviously)? Like Myth, Oni, and Marathon?

Given that they recently put a bunch of weapons from their older games in Destiny, but had to modify the names slightly, I suspect the answer is "no".

Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal

#104

Post by craz8 »

ngngngng wrote: post #6

Another one! I'm interested to see how this plays out. Most of Microsoft's acquisitions in recent years have been failures. Studios that had been making iconic games were acquired by Microsoft and in short order were only making shovelware (see Rare post acquisition). Sony doesn't seem to have the same problem. Sucker Punch and Insomniac are good examples of this, their output has been as good as ever since being acq…

It’s interesting that Sucker Punch and Bungie offices were really close to each other - maybe 2 blocks? Although I read that Sucker Punch recently moved, and I don’t know the new location.

I can imagine them sharing all sorts of things between studios now that they have the same ownership. It will at least allow shared lunch time conversations to be less guarded

Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal

#105

Post by w4rh4wk5 »

dogma1138 wrote: post #83
brokencode wrote: post #39

Let’s hope this goes better for Bungie than when Microsoft owned them. It’s kind of funny that they’d get out from under the thumb of one corporate overlord only to find a new corporate overlord 15 years later. I guess that points to how unbelievably hard it is for independent game developers to survive, and it makes me kind of sad. If it can happen to Bungie or Blizzard, it can happen to any game developer. Gamers a…

Halo 1-3, ODST and Reach what exactly went wrong for Bungie when they were under Microsoft? Microsoft, Activision, Sony they were never truly independent no studio these days can afford too. Game development is a mess and a very expensive mess at that, you need a sugar daddy if you would to survive.

Exactly. Just looking at the Master Chief collection shows that the games were quite alright.

Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal

#106

Post by theandrewbailey »

dogma1138 wrote: post #83
brokencode wrote: post #39

Let’s hope this goes better for Bungie than when Microsoft owned them. It’s kind of funny that they’d get out from under the thumb of one corporate overlord only to find a new corporate overlord 15 years later. I guess that points to how unbelievably hard it is for independent game developers to survive, and it makes me kind of sad. If it can happen to Bungie or Blizzard, it can happen to any game developer. Gamers a…

Halo 1-3, ODST and Reach what exactly went wrong for Bungie when they were under Microsoft? Microsoft, Activision, Sony they were never truly independent no studio these days can afford too. Game development is a mess and a very expensive mess at that, you need a sugar daddy if you would to survive.

> Halo 1-3, ODST and Reach what exactly went wrong for Bungie when they were under Microsoft?

Bungie didn't like how Microsoft managed them. Bungie wanted to do something other than Halo, but Microsoft wanted more Halo.

A Destiny reference can be seen in ODST: https://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2014/01/09/h...

Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal

#107

Post by pjerem »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #29

I know bungie doesn't own the halo ip anymore, but wow . Bungie, halo, and microsoft will forever be linked in my mind. The fact that sony is going to buy them? I feel like hell has frozen over. What's next? MS buying naughty dog?

Well, nothing surprises me anymore since Microsoft bought Rare two decades ago. Nintendo literally sold a part of its soul on this deal.

But yeah, it’s hard to dissociate Halo from Bungie and Microsoft.

Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal

#108

Post by steveklabnik »

er4hn wrote: post #101
HWR_14 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft didn't buy Halo. They bought Bungie, then used them to make Halo. They spin them off, keeping then Halo franchise. Okay, technically Bungie was working on a RTS game called Halo when MS bought them, but it was after the purchase it shifted genres and found its groove. In other words, this "echo" isn't really what you are saying.

Halo was an FPS and a spiritual successor to an earlier series of theirs called "Marathon". The main characters, weapons, and themes of the original game all skew very closely to Marathon.

There's also tangential evidence that Pathways Into Darkness, Marathon, Halo, and Destiny all exist in the same universe.

And with this recent 30th anniversary event, it also seems like they kind of think of all of their various older IPs to be in a multiverse of some sort.

(And Pathways into Darkness was also an FPS, just like those three Marathon games. Bungie has been doing FPSes for a long time, 100% agree with you.)

Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal

#109

Post by gamblor956 »

erulabs wrote: post #56
brokencode wrote: post #39

Let’s hope this goes better for Bungie than when Microsoft owned them. It’s kind of funny that they’d get out from under the thumb of one corporate overlord only to find a new corporate overlord 15 years later. I guess that points to how unbelievably hard it is for independent game developers to survive, and it makes me kind of sad. If it can happen to Bungie or Blizzard, it can happen to any game developer. Gamers a…

I hear that metric a lot - dollars per entertainment-hour. It's an interesting metric - but it's also important to remember the 1.5 hour Marvel film almost certainly took more human hours in the input side than virtually any video game. At least, my 10k hours in StarCraft took far far far fewer human hours to produce than my 1.5 hours watching the Avengers. Sort of a "labor theory of value" for entertainment pricing,…

also important to remember the 1.5 hour Marvel film almost certainly took more human hours in the input side than virtually any video game

This is simply wrong.

Marvel movies (and indeed, most studio releases) are generally produced and released within a year or two. Only the biggest blockbusters have crews in the hundreds, and it is rare for a movie to have a crew in the thousands. For example, Endgame is one of the most expensive movies ever made...and production and post-production (i.e., VFX) took less than 2 years. Dune (2021) was filmed and post-produced in under 2 years. Tenet, Nolan's most technically complex film, was actually filmed and post-produced in just over 1 year. (But contrast to Avatar 2 and 3, which have been in production for over 4 years and counting.)

On the other hand, almost every AAA game of the last decade has spent years in development with a crew of hundreds for almost the entire time. For example, Red Dead 2 was in development for 7 years. Starcraft 2 was in development for over 5 years. Destiny was in development for 4 years.

Note that the above timeline does not include pre-production work (like writing the screenplay, casting, hiring crew, raising funds) because in the movie industry pre-production work proceeds very slowly (for example: Avatar 2 was in pre-production for 7 years; Gemini Man for over 20 years), but the actual production and post-production (i.e., the actual making of the movie, editing, FX) happens at a lightning pace. In the game industry, the creative parts happen in tandem with the development of the game itself.

Also note that while movies can have large crews, the different teams aren't all working at the same time; for example, film crews and other production crews rarely interact with the VFX or other post-production crew.

Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal

#110

Post by sylens »

015a wrote: post #77

Outside looking in, this feels like a far more valuable acquisition than Activision for $69B. Call of Duty is valuable, but Microsoft has already said they don't intend to remove it from PlayStation. That could change, but so could CoD's importance to the video gaming industry as a whole: its popularity has dropped with essentially every release since BLOPS2. Outside of CoD: AB is a shadow of its former self; IMO the…

> In comparison: Sony paid 20x less for Bungie. What they lack in variety of products, they make up for in, in my view, Potential. Destiny is a great franchise, with lots of fans. The team brings rock solid FPS dev & netcode experience (something Sony's first party studios are at a deficit for).

I disagree. Destiny may have once had potential, but Bungie is a studio that continually shoots itself in the foot. Just like with Halo, they threw out years of work for the first Destiny and essentially stitched together a frankenstein of the parts to ship on time. It's why the story has never made sense, even as they try to retcon various pieces to fit into a much longer narrative.

The game has also lost some of its early "looter shooter with friends" charm and become a grindfest that feels like a job at times, with content that is sunset only 2-3 years after it is sold to consumers. Destiny 2 is also extremely hostile to new players, bombarding them with dozens of vendors, currencies, and no clear sense of where to start and how to begin grokking the story. The original campaign has been sunset so if you never played before, you will be missing the equivalent of the first movie of a trilogy in terms of plot and characters.

My hope for this acquisition is that it lets them course correct the design of whatever they do next because I feel that Destiny 2 is in decline.

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