Sony's Billion Dollar Bungie Buyout Is Looking More and More Like a Blunder | Push Square

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Back when Sony announced its $3.6 billion acquisition of Bungie, we didn’t quite understand it. Sony was under intense pressure at the time, as Microsoft was still in the midst of its corporate consolidation storm, and didn’t look likely to stop until it owned most of the industry. Acquiring the legendary Halo creator always struck us as something of a panic buy; it felt like the firm snagged the Destiny developer purely to stop anyone else from owning it, and many analysts at the time mentioned that the Japanese giant may have overpaid.

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Born out of Bungie

You didn’t understand it either. In a poll published in the aftermath of the announcement, a sizeable 32 per cent of you seemed bemused by the news, while a further 23 per cent of you felt it was a bad decision.

However, as the deal closed and further details emerged, it did start to make a semblance of sense: Sony was betting the house on live service, and wanted one of the biggest names in the business under its umbrella. The idea was to establish a so-called ‘Live Service Center of Excellence’ – a company-wide task force with Bungie at the helm designed to enrich and improve all of its projects across the space.

But without being intimate with the inner-workings of the studio, we always found this strange: Destiny 2 had long been criticised by its player base, and all of the outside noises around the title always seemed to signal discontent. Lightfall released to a disastrous reception prompting apologies from the studio, and it’s only with The Final Shape that the developer appears to have won back its fans.

To make matters worse, Bungie prompted public ire when it appeared to have the final say in Naughty Dog’s cancellation of its long-awaited The Last of Us 2 multiplayer game. We don’t really believe in scapegoats, because presumably we’d all be happily playing Factions right now if whatever Naughty Dog was making was amazing, but the subsequent announcements of Concord