The Japanese technology group Sony is taking over the American computer game company Bungie, maker of Halo and Destiny, among others. The deal is worth about 3.6 billion dollars.
The wave of consolidation in the video game market continues unabated. Following Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard earlier this month, Sony has now announced that it is acquiring game developer Bungie for about $3.6 billion.
With the purchase, Sony, which makes the PlayStation game console, wants to strengthen its position in the game industry. It is the largest acquisition of a games producer by Sony in ten years. The acquisition is also remarkable because Bungie has long made exclusive games for the Xbox consoles of competitor Microsoft with Halo. The company, founded in 1991, belonged to Microsoft between 2000 and 2007.
As part of Sony, Bungie will not suddenly make exclusive games for PlayStation, the tech giant reports in its blog. Instead, Bungie will operate largely independently, and the developer’s games, including the popular Destiny 2, will continue to be playable across platforms. New games from Bungie are also expected to be released on PC and Xbox.
Then why the takeover? In their press release, Sony also hints at the so-called ‘IP’ or intellectual property of Bungie, in addition to the typical reasoning around acceleration and expertise. The rights to the sci-fi game world of Halo or Destiny can be worth quite a lot to a media company like Sony, which can make games, movies and series. In recent months and years, other games have already been converted to popular series. Think, for example, of The Witcher (with the Netflix series of the same name), League of Legends (with Arcane) and even the original Castlevania (also already on Netflix).
In addition, Sony is also participating in a broad trend towards consolidation in the video game market. The Bungie acquisition is already the industry’s third major deal in a short time. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that it would acquire game producer Activision Blizzard, the company behind games such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, for $69 billion. In addition, the producer of mobile games, Zynga, known for the game FarmVille, is acquired by industry peer Take-Two Interactive Software for $12.7 billion.
