[worrycue]

Insomniac I can understand. The company has a lot of history with Sony.

Bungie is puzzling. Frankly, I’m not even sure what’s there to buy. All they got is Destiny that’s a pretty so-so game popularity-wise.

Who else has Sony bought?

[wilg]

Naughty Dog, Media Molecule, Guerrilla Games, Sucker Punch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Studios

[worrycue]

I meant recently. Those are ancient history - most of them have history with Sony before being acquired.

[wilg]

Why does that matter? Early bird gets to buy the worm? Is it less anti-competitive if we forgot about it?

[worrycue]

Because we are talking about the companies’ behaviour today? MS is trying to buy one of the biggest publishers right now.

Secondly, most of those game studios already have a close relationship with Sony, they can be considered 2nd party, and mostly make PS games. Sony’s competitors aren’t losing out much.

P.S. Frankly, I don’t think Sony ever intended to be in the game development business - they are a hardware company. There is a pattern to the game developers they buy - almost all of them are “tech wiz” developers; i.e. optimisation gods while gameplay of their games are usually so-so. The raison d'être of their acquired studios are to showcase the power of their hardware and coincidently provide development tool chain feedback as well as development knowledge which Sony’s “ICE team” will then share with other developers, not compete with their 3rd party developers.

That said this might have change in recent years as exclusives become a differentiator for their console.

[fomine3]

Speaking about the origin of Sony PlayStation divison (Sony Computer Entertainment), it was derived from Sony Music. Its origin was a content company than a hardware company.

[worrycue]

Going to need a citation for that.

The PlayStation all started with Ken Kutaragi who worked in Sony’s digital research labs. It started as the “Play Station” a CD addon for the SNES. But due to contract disputes Sony got dumped for Philips in a very public fashion - probably Nintendo’s biggest mistake ever. Sony went ahead on its own and created the “PlayStation” (aka PS1 today) and the rest is history.

Don’t see where Sony Music comes into the story.

[Cyph0n]

All of these had existing relationships with Sony and made PS exclusives anyways (i.e., so-called 2nd party studios).

[ESMirro]

The Bungie purchase isn’t puzzling if you look at Sony’s future trajectory. They have 10 or so live-service titles in development, and have stated very openly that they aim to greatly expand their offerings in that area going forward. There are only a handful of studios that have created successful live service games and even fewer that haven’t leant on popular existing IP (such as Call of Duty: Warzone) to do so, Bungie (and Epic) are pretty much the pioneers in this space, and Bungie have learnt a lot from their trials cultivating the Destiny franchise.

Sony purchased Bungie to essentially teach them how to make successful live service games, not for the IP. They hold so much power inside PlayStation studios that they, as per the recent The Last of Us factions leaks, review and determine if a multiplayer title meets their requirements for success (factions didn’t).

I don’t think it’s a good thing (as I personally disapprove of the way Destiny operates & see a focus on these sorts of games from Sony as a major blunder) but the business logic of the purchase is obvious.

[enragedcacti]

Destiny 2 has the 20th most concurrent users on Steam right now and had 300k+ concurrent players after the last $30 expansion, its by all rights a very successful game within the live service RPG space.