A lot of big game companies tried to get the best console money can’t buy because there aren’t enough of them to go around. The most recent news: Sony plans to buy Bungie, the company that made Halo and Destiny, for $3.6 billion.
Besides the fact that Bungie is known for making high-quality games, the deal is also a new twist in the strange storey of how it came to be. A lot of people know the name Bungie because they made the game Halo. Bungie was first bought by Microsoft in 2000 and became a household name. After leaving Microsoft in 2007, Bungie signed a 10-year publishing deal with Activision Blizzard (which it left in 2019). Microsoft said earlier this month that it was going to buy Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion.
Keep in mind that Take-Two Interactive agreed to buy Farmville-maker Zynga for $12.7 billion last month. When everything else is going on, where is Nintendo in it? In Super Mario Odyssey, they’re stuck in the sand kingdom level and yelling at each other.
In other words: So what will happen next?
The good news for Destiny fans who play on Xbox and PC is that Sony says the acquisition of Bungie isn’t about making new, exclusive content for Playstation at this time. This means Bungie will still be able to make games for a wide range of platforms and sell them on their own. Microsoft made the same announcement for its Activision deal. It said that it will keep supporting Activision Blizzard games on other platforms, like it has done with Minecraft.
They may seem like the start of a new era in the console wars, but these cross-platform friendly moves show that the industry is paying more attention to subscriptions now than it did before.
In the Xbox Game Pass, there are more than 400 games that you can get and play for one monthly fee. Microsoft says there are 25 million people who use the service.
Destiny 2, Bungie’s most popular game, is free to play, but there are also season passes and expansions that you can buy. The game has been played by 20 million people since 2019.
In December, Bloomberg said that Sony is planning a new subscription service to compete with Game Pass, which is a service that lets people play games for a set amount of time.
Now, Sony and Microsoft have subscription services and well-known games to protect them from a shaky supply chain for now.