When Sony announced the purchase of Bungie for $3.6 billion, many thought the Japanese had gone mad. Why pay such an amount of money for a company that only has an active franchise? The reality, however, is that the Japanese did not take over the American studio for destiny, but for how its experience in games as a service could benefit multiple PlayStation projects.
“Bungie’s successful track record in cross-platform publishing and Games-as-a-Service will help us realize our ambitions to take PlayStation beyond the console and grow our potential audience,” said Jim Ryan, head of Sony Interactive Entertainment (PlayStation ), in January 2022.
However, it took several months after the purchase was closed – in July 2022 – for Bungie to really begin to influence various titles that are on their way to the PlayStation platform.
In a recent conference held by Jim Ryan and Hermen Hulst (head of PlayStation Studios), the latter pointed out that Bungie is already advising the brand in different areas. The main one, obviously, is that of games as services.
“The learning we’ve gotten from Bungie has been very important in many areas. Of course, when you’re developing titles as a service, you have capabilities that you don’t have when you’re working on single-player narrative games. These capabilities that we’ve fine-tuned at PlayStation Studios have been supported and guided by Bungie. We have a deeper understanding of what success in services means,” Hulst said (via TweakTown).
PlayStation, for years, has been recognized for its focus on narrative experiences. The Last of Us, Horizon and god of war are some examples in the recent era. The problem is that the platform does not currently have a single multiplayer game that is a benchmark in the industry; one that can generate recurring income for a long period of time. Fortnite, Call of Duty: Warzone, Apex Legends and pubg they dominate much of a market that generates billions of dollars annually.
Consequently, Sony can no longer afford to be absent from games as a service. Years ago, they launched a strategy that consists, precisely, of putting several of their internal studios to work on projects of this type.
Yesterday, during PlayStation Showcase 2023, we started to see the first fruits of that vision. fairgame$, helldivers 2 and Concord they are just the first wave of games as a service powered by PlayStation. And of course, the icing on the cake is missing: marathonfrom Bungie.
Have no doubt that Bungie has been involved, to a lesser or greater extent, in the creation of the aforementioned titles. After all, his experience is more than proven.
“Historically, our games have an end (for only having a single player campaign), and this is a great cultural change. We work with Bungie in a rigorous review process of the 12 games as a service that we are developing, “added the manager. .
In fact, rumors recently surfaced that the multiplayer game from Deviation Games, a third-party studio associated with PlayStation, was cancelled. After Hulst’s statements, it has been speculated that the project did not pass Bungie’s quality filter. This information, however, is not confirmed.
Of course, it will be necessary to wait until these games are released as a PlayStation service to find out exactly how Bungie collaborated.