“Bungie’s technical expertise, coupled with their track record of building highly engaged communities, make them a natural fit for collaboration with PlayStation Studios,” said Herman Hulst, head of PlayStation Studios. “We are excited to make plans to share skills and expertise, and to unlock the potential in having the brilliant minds at Bungie under the PlayStation roof.

“I believe that Bungie joining the PlayStation family will increase the capabilities of PlayStation Studios, and of Bungie, and achieve our vision of expanding PlayStation to hundreds of millions of gamers. For game creators, that’s always our goal: to bring our vision to as many people as possible.”


Both sides have also made it clear that Bungie still can self-publish games, have full control of their existing IP and won't be favoring Sony consoles with Destiny content.

So what I'm REALLY interested in is that the primary thing they talk about is bringing Bungie's technical expertise into the Playstation Studios umbrella on Sony's end and Bungie being able to rapidly expand their workforce on their end. To me, this all sounds like a further push into the Playstation Studios branding that we've already seen little benefits from, like Guerilla and Kojima Productions collaborating on ideas and engine development for Horizon and Death Stranding, or Santa Monica Studios and Naughty Dog collaborating on the narrative and cinematic aspects of God of War, or developers on The Last of Us 2 easily transitioning from Naughty Dog to Santa Monica to work on Ragnarok.


You can see a future in which Bungie - which is gonna have over 1,000 employees after this deal goes through and just one game in its portfolio - is almost like an elite task force for Sony to deploy across their various other projects whether it's live service support, a new FPS franchise in development or just general technical wizardry. This almost seems more like an infrastructure purchase than a product purchase.

Interesting!



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