Sony recently shook the industry with the announcement that it’s acquiring Bungie in deal worth $3.6 billion. Of course, with Bungie being the studio that created Halo and having been so strongly associated with Xbox for so long, you’d think that the acquisition-friendly serial spenders at Microsoft would have tried to nab the deal themselves rather than letting such a big name join a competitor- it’s not like they couldn’t afford it, after all.
It seems, however, that if things had gone differently, Microsoft would have been able to pull that off and bring Bungie back into the Xbox fold. Recently, known insider Nate the Hate (a.k.a. Direct-Feed Games) took to Twitter and stated that Microsoft and Bungie had been in discussions regarding a possible acquisition “on and off four a couple of years.”
Apparently, talks between the two came to a halt in 2020 when Bungie demanded a price of roughly $2 billion, as well as them retaining their independence even after an acquisition, which collectively was deemed too high of an asking price by the decision makers at Microsoft.
Interestingly, rumours of Bungie being acquired by Xbox were indeed doing the rounds in 2020, though around that time, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons denied those reports.
Of course, what’s interesting is that Bungie eventually ended up selling to Sony for a significantly higher price, and successfully retained their independence- which is good for Xbox, because Destiny 2 and future Bungie games are going to remain multiplatform.
It seems like Sony’s deal with Bungie has been in the works for several months as well, so it’s interesting to hear about some behind-the-scenes details about what might have been if things had turned out a little differently.