Bungie, the studio behind Destiny, will become an independent subsidiary of Sony Interactive Entertainment once a $3.6 billion acquisition closes, the company announced on Monday.
The studio will be run by a board of directors including current CEO and chairman Pete Parsons and the rest of the studio’s current management team. This bombshell deal comes only two weeks after Microsoft announced the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
Additionally, Bungie stressed in an official blog post that their games will not be PlayStation exclusive going forward.
“We want the worlds we are creating to extend to anywhere people play games,” the Destiny development team wrote. “We will continue to be self-published, creatively independent, and we will continue to drive one, unified Bungie community.”
Bungie has been busy adding new content to Destiny 2 while supporting the player base. The studio has confirmed that this acquisition will not impact their commitment to working on multi-platform features like cross save and cross play.
Bungie falls under the Sony umbrella
Sony Interactive Entertainment president CEO Jim Ryan met the announcement with excitement about bringing the popular studio under their wing.
“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,” Ryan said.
Previously, Microsoft had acquired Bungie in June 0f 2000 with the studio making Halo as an exclusive for the original Xbox. The studio then became independent in October of 2007 before creating the Destiny franchise. At the game’s launch and until 2019, Activision Blizzard served as the publisher for Destiny and Destiny 2. This marks the second time the studio itself has been acquired by a major publisher.
This is also another huge deal that continues the trend of industry consolidation. Major publishers like Microsoft and Sony have been increasing their market share by purchasing gaming studios and IPs like Bungie, Bethesda, Roblox, Activision Blizzard and others.
