Sony Pulled Bungie's Head Out of Its Ass, and an Ex-Lawyer Reckons That Was a Good Thing | Push Square
A former Bungie lawyer has made some illuminating remarks concerning parent company Sony and its wayward, unruly child. Following its acquisition by the PlayStation platform holder in 2022, Bungie has frequently been in the headlines, but rarely for the right reasons.
On that most exciting of all social media platforms, former Bungie general counsel Don McGowan turned up the heat in a LinkedIn post (thanks, IGN), responding to a Kotaku article. McGowan praised the powers that be at Sony for «inflicting some discipline on my former colleagues [which] may have forced them to fix the things that were wrong with their game.»
Taking no prisoners, McGowan continued, and qualified: «To be clear: I’m not talking about the layoffs, I’m talking about forcing them to get their heads out of their asses and focus on things like implementing a method of new player acquisition; not just doing fan service for the Bungie C-suite; and running the game like a business.»
It's not often we hear from corporate lawyers in this context, and it's quite a nice change of pace. Still not done, McGowan's harang continues: «There were a lot of egos for whom it was important to pretend that 'nothing would change'. I remember sitting there during the deal saying, 'Do you think Sony describes this as them getting to pay $3.6 billion for the right to have no input into what Bungie does?' That was exactly what a lot of people thought.»
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Did Sony wait too long before getting involved? Was Bungie just missing its parent company's guiding, paternal hand? Let us know in the comments section below.
Khayl Adam is Push Square's roving Australian correspondent, a reporter tasked with scouring the internet for the richest, most succulent PlayStation stories. With five years of experience as a freelance journalist and mercenary wordsmith, RPGs are his first great love, but strategy and tactics games are a close second, genres in which he is only too happy to
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