Sony buys Bungie for $3.6 billion
Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has agreed to acquire Bungie Studio. The total value of the transaction will be $3.6 billion.
According to its terms, Bungie after the merger will operate independently from Sony and be considered an independent division of SIE. It will continue to be led by the former board of directors with Pete Parsons at the head.
The studio will retain the right to independently publish products. She will also decide for herself where and how to collect the user base.
It is understood that the deal will provide Sony with access to Bungie’s tools and technologies for working with game services.
At the same time, Jim Ryan, president and CEO of SIE, said that such a purchase is “An important step in our strategy to significantly increase the PlayStation audience.”
As for Parsons, he noted that, given the potential of the Bungie universes, the studio hopes to become a global multimedia entertainment company with the help of SIE.
Bungie is currently based in Bellevue. The company employs more than 900 employees who support Destiny 2 and are working “on new worlds of the future IP“.
The irony of the purchase is that Bungie has been owned by Microsoft for a long time. From 2000 to 2007, the studio worked on the main system-seller of the Xbox Halo series. The rights to the latter are still for Microsoft.
In 2010, Bungie signed a publishing deal with Activision Blizzard. According to its terms, the studio remained independent, and its future IP remained with it. However, Activision Blizzard was to remain their publisher for ten years. As part of this collaboration, the Destiny dilogy was released.
In 2019, the deal was terminated and Bungie began to be responsible for publishing the series itself. A year before, the Korean publisher NetEase became its minority shareholder. He acquired an unspecified stake in the studio in the amount of $100 million. It is unclear from SIE’s press release whether it is outbidding NetEase’s stake.
The purchase comes on the back of Activision Blizzard’s $68.7 billion acquisition by Microsoft. Recall that it became known a little more than a week ago, on January 18. Because of the timing, Bungie’s current purchase looks like a response to a large-scale Microsoft deal, although it has been preparing for the last five to six months.
No less funny is that Microsoft has been negotiating to buy Bungie for several years. However, the deal was not destined to take place. The studio was considered too expensive an acquisition.
