Interesting.... so this was all SE western stuff and none of the JP stuff. Is CD still assisting on Perfect Dark after this?

So I just read that CD will still be working on PD.

I said Square was going to do this months ago, they just have no real gains in Western development and they don't know what to do with those studios.

However, this was a dumb decision IMO to sell at this cost and at this time when someone like MS would have probably spent closer to $1 billion on them.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Sony offers Square a Bungie-like deal at this point.

MS
If anything this is probably confirmation that Microsoft cannot buy any other publisher or developer for the rest of the year until they get confirmation that the Activision-Blizzard deal goes through, because otherwise, they would have easily been able to buy these studios for $1 billion and had all their content in GamePass by their June Showcase. Crystal is basically a hired developer for them right now on Perfect Dark, and Edios and Sqaure Montreal were both talented / good picks as well.

Embracer Group
This is great for Embracer Group, and goes to show that once again an acquisition is not just about who spends the most money, as there were plenty of companies that could have easily outbid them, yet Embracer was still the one to acquire these studios. They're becoming a gaming and entertainment powerhouse with Dark Horse comics, Gearbox (Borderlands / Brothers in Arms), Deep Silver (Saint's Row / Dead Island / Time Splitters now), Warhorse (Kingdom Come), Saber Interactive (Crysis Remastered / Co-developed a lot of Halo modes/content / Timeshift / and a bunch of mid but at least decent mid), THQ Nordic (Darksiders), and now Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Legacy of Kain, and more.

SE
I also think this was best for SE as well, since they had awful projections on the success they expected from their western teams, and didn't have any idea what to do with them after throwing them to into Marvel devs and failing. This will allow them to focus significantly more on JRPGs the genre they're good at (however, they've been slipping here).

SE / Sony Acquisition
This also brings up another thing what does Square's Market Value look like now as it was just below $5 billion prior? And is Square the publisher people were claiming Sony was trying to buy. Realistically it makes sense, the two have had several exclusive AAA games, and Sony is about owning and expanding AAA IP and Final Fantasy is an ideal IP for that. Sony has an amazing partnership with not only Square but Disney and Marvel and Kingdom Hearts is a bridge there and if I remember correctly they didn't show what platforms it was coming to which makes no sense considering part 3 came to all of them. Final Fantasy games / movies, Kingdom Hearts games / movies, Dragon Quest anime seasons, Life is Strange Netflix series, etc....

WB doesnt matter all their Ips are rented out from someone else. Even mortal kombat will be lost and can WB sell Mortal Kombat and take it away from Netherrealm because they dont on their IP.

True, Thief started off as a great series back in the day!

I feel as if we had been....wait for it....robbed of a proper sequel up until now!

To you & I that seems like an overprice for Bungie but Sony is a billion-dollar business & they must have had good business reasons to buy Bungie at that price,evidently knowing something that we don't know.

I don't think they overpaid. Destiny is one of the top 5 lucrative game in the world I think. It gives them a huge IP to counter COD, Fallout and TES (not Halo, they don't care about that).

sony didnt just pay 3.6 billion for the company and the destiny ip. they paid for bungie's tech and knowledge in the gaas world. over 1 billion of the 3.6 billion purchase price went specifically to the people who actually made the game. they wanted to make sure they werent going anywhere for 5 yrs so they could use there expertise to help then jumpstart gaas for other playstation studios. im not a big fan of gaas in general, but with the right ip i will definitely jump in with both feet. i am especially interested in the last of us game and the rumored insomniac marvel gaas game. bungie is a major money maker and they are going to show sony how do do it properly. seems like a lot of money now, but they will quickly recoup the money with bungie's help.

Yea because apparently there no other completely online games with succesfull online strcutures right?? Bungie must be geniuses to have the first online game ever.

Ive heard that rubbish regurgitated so many times about the talent and online structure.

Like i said u can try swing it anyway u want but bungie aint close to being worth 3.5 billion.

There were much better deals to be made out there with much more talented devs.

This deal proves that, the deal for insomniac proves it, the deal for bethesda proves it, thats what you call good value for talented devs, multiple studios and multiple valuable ips.

Destiny is a good game at best, dont know why you defenders come put acting like they have created gamings masterpiece to be so overvalued.

The bungie deal stinks and you know hence why u need to cling to internet infrastructure, so called talented devs that have made 2 games since halo with a metacritic sitting around 80 at best. And my favorite one to hear is bungie has something hiding that we dont know about lol.

Bungie aint that talented, they skinned sonny for everything they could and came out on top.

Yah bungie went downhill after halo

They secured the talent at bungie which is more vital than the IP itself. If you remember something like 2 billion was paid to make sure the staff stays.

You are missing the point completely. Ms paid 45% above market value for Activision so the market has inflated. Another thing people miss in that 3.6 billion is about half of that is going towards making Bungie even bigger and retaining their current talent core

No doubt in a normal world Bungie would go for under 1 billion and Activision for around 45 billion but this no longer is normal

Flaw

Sony knows what they are working on and we don't

"Sony overpaid for Bungie Overcome Objection 101"

1. Made the 3rd and 4th best-selling FPS franchises of all time, with both earning over $4 billion in revenue.
2. Owns rights to said 3rd best-selling FPS franchise of all-time which earned over $4 billion in 2 games.
3. Said franchise earns an average of over $300 million per year in add-on content
4. Said franchise in its 4th year still sees several hundred thousand - 1 million players daily (other IPs are dead)
5. Said franchise is becoming a multi-media IP for gaming / film&TV / and eventually heavy merchandise
6. Expertise in Live-Service games (of which Sony has plenty to release and learn from)

Definitely not worth $3.6 billion.

Possibly the only independent developer at the time to have not one but 2 multi-billion dollar franchises to their name.

For comparison, every single-player game would need to sell 33+ million copies to hit multi-billion status but since PS5 games are now $70 Sony helped drop the goal down to a more achievable 28.5+ million copies for multi-billion status.

Every F2P game would have to earn $200,000,000 per year for the next 10 years, to achieve what Destiny does/did in just 3 - 4 years. That's if said multiplayer game is even able to achieve a 3 - 4 year lifespans while maintaining a 6 and 7-figure player counts daily. Meanwhile in reality player counts for anything not named Fortnite, Warzone, Apex haven't seen 6 figure player counts 6 months post launch.

That's why they paid for them. Bungie's games will pay the $3.6 billion on it's own over time. They also have a studio that can help their other live-service games hopefully see even 1/4 of the success Destiny has had which would be a huge financial win.

It's the same things as someone buying an investment home, yes for some people it could be 3% of their own overall value or 1/3 or 1/5 of your budget, but if your investment pans out you can make 2x or significantly more than you paid for the property to begin with.