Bungie now belongs to PlayStation

This story about more mega acquisitions, boiled down, in 1:29 minutes.

What's the fuss?

A couple of weeks after Microsoft made the biggest gaming acquisition of all time, its steepest competition makes its own of similar magnitude. The timing, and target, hit Microsoft close to home.

The situation

Both of the major players in console gaming, Microsoft (Xbox) and Sony (PlayStation), own a plethora of first-party game studios.

• The size of these studios range from small independent studios to large studios that have developed some of gaming's largest titles.
• Microsoft's portfolio of studios was joined by one of the largest studios in the world, Activision Blizzard, in exchange for a record-breaking $68.7 billion.

Many wondered how Sony would respond to this announcement, and they did in a big way.

• Sony just purchased Bungie Studios, another large studio that created the original Halo and the developers of the popular gaming franchise Destiny.
• Bungie is smaller than Activision Blizzard, which is reflected in the purchase price at $3.6 billion - but still nothing to sneeze at.

Boiling it down

It's a little humourous that Sony would go after Bungie, since Bungie arguably single-handedly made Xbox a success in the first place.

• The legendary Halo: Combat Evolved, developed by Bungie, released alongside the launch of the original Xbox in 2001 and is widely known as one of the best games of all time.
• Bungie would go on to develop 5 more Halo games before passing the reins to another studio, although many refer to the Bungie-developed Halo games as the best in the series.
  

It's doubtful that this deal is in direct response to Microsoft's purchase of Activision-Blizzard.

• Deals of this magnitude usually take many months to fully dissect and analyze, so its unlikely that due diligence began after Microsoft's announcement.
• It seems like Sony will adopt Microsoft's playbook of not making the acquiree's games exclusive to their platform, however there likely will be some incentives from Bungie to choose PlayStation over the competition.

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