Official - Bungie Departing Microsoft

jasoncart writes "Microsoft today confirmed the news that has been speculated for some days, that Halo developer Bungie is 'on the path' to becoming an independent company. Microsoft describes this as an 'evolution' of their relationship, but no concrete reason is given for this move. 'Shane Kim, corporate vice president of Microsoft Game Studios, said the company was "supporting Bungie's desire to return to its independent roots". However, he added, Microsoft "will continue to invest in our Halo entertainment property with Bungie and other partners, such as Peter Jackson, on a new interactive series set in the Halo universe". "We look forward to great success with Bungie as our long-term relationship continues to evolve through Halo-related titles and new IP created by Bungie," he added.'" MTV wonders out loud ... if Bungie doesn't make Halo 4 who will? The official press release from Bungie gives you the same information from the other side, as does an interview with Frankie at GameDailyBiz. Update: 10/05 21:25 GMT by Z : In the wake of the announcement Kotaku has a quickie email interview discussing the future of the company.

I know...

[Pojut]

...that I'm not on the inside so I don't know all the little happenings that occur behind closed doors, but it's quite obvious that the Halo franchise is a boon to both Bungie and to Microsoft...I wouldn't be suprised if Halo remained a Bungie and Microsoft exclusive venture....Bungie getting more freedom to do what they wish with the franchise, and getting a healthy sum of money from Microsoft in the process.

In all honesty, both sides would be foolish to give up the current relationship they have with that franchise, even if Bungie becomes 100% independent.

Re:Huh?

[EricR86]

Personally, I would love to see Bungie (finally) create a non-Halo title. They make good games, it'd be nice to see a good game that isn't a moderate evolution of a previous one. Enough with the sequels.

And If I was a game developer working on the same title for years on end - I'd probably want a change too.

Re:I know...

[svendsen]

100% agreed. With all the money Bungie has mad from the MS deal they can use it to branch out the halo franchise, invest more into R&D, make new games, etc.

And MS...well we know how much Halo has helped them. So they don;t want to ruin it either.

Re:Huh?

[EricR86]

Personally I'd love to see them develop a non-Halo title. Bungee makes great games, it'd be nice to see their creative talents leaned in a different direction. Enough with the sequels. And I can imagine if I was a game developer working with the same series for years on end (since 1999?), I'd probably want a change too. If they develop a non-Halo title, for PC, I'd be one of the first to try it.

Nobody should be surprised

[paleo2002]

Ever since Bungie was purchased by Microsoft, they've done nothing but produce Halo for the XBox. No PC ports, no different games, they're barely even allowed to produce story-driven single player content. Go back and look at Bungie's pre-Xbox games: the Marathon series (which was intended to tie in to Halo), the Myth series, even Pathways into Darkness was more original than Halo 3.

I was angry with Bungie when, just a few months before Halo was to be released as a Mac exclusive, Microsoft bought them out and put them to work. But eventually I began to feel sorry for them. Bungie has had its creativity stifled for quite some time now and they've finally realized it.

Re:Nobody should be surprised

[Tridus]

A very very pathetic attempt at marketing.

Re:Yea, like releasing more PC products.

[Pojut]

From a consumers point of view, that is a shitty stupid thing to do...but look at it from a buisness point of view, or more specifically Microsoft's point of view...it makes perfect sense.

Microsoft already has a legal monopoly in the computing industry...they are only in their second generation in the gaming industry. They need something to help cement themselves into place...the halo series is one of their primary tools for doing so. While for CONSUMERS it would make more sense and would be better to release them simultaneously, it wouldn't make much sense for their console devision...I can assure you, Microsoft would most likely rather sell you a copy of a game for their console which they lose money on/barely make any money on (the console itself, that is) which is trying to establish itself rather than sell you a copy of a game for an operating system that has a steadfast hold on the industry.

I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying that I understand.

I like them.

[SanityInAnarchy]

I don't mean another game that's called Halo, and is set in exactly the same storyline.

More like one set in the same universe. It's my understanding that basically every shooter they've ever put out, including the Marathon games, is set in the same universe. Maybe even the shooter/rpg before that... what was it called?

But imagine being a Marathon fan leading up to the launch of the original Halo. Cortana actually sent out emails to various fan sites ahead of time, so people were analyzing all the ways in which her emails could be related to a sequel to Marathon... and then they got Halo, which was so completely different, yet in the same universe, with kind of the same theme.

I would love to see them do something like that again. Imagine something as much better than Halo as Halo was better than Marathon.

Re:Huh?

[Gaerek]

No Halo 4? You mean, $170 Million in the FIRST day of sales isn't enough incentive to make Halo 4? I'm sorry, but there's way too much money wrapped up in that franchise. It's not going anywhere soon.

Re:Huh?

[efity]

Microsoft doesn't know how to milk people for money, you say? Let's look at two of Microsoft's base products, XP and Vista. Now they could just release two full-featured packages, one of XP and one of Vista, but that's not how you profit.

This is how you profit: Making ten versions of two products, with minor differences in between versions, but charging $100 more to advance to the next level.

XP Home Edition
XP Professional
XP Tablet PC Edition
XP Media Center Edition
XP Professional x64 Edition
Vista Home Basic
Vista Home Premium
Vista Business
Vista Enterprise
Vista Ultimate

While it's not exactly merchandising, it's pretty damn close.

Re:Nobody should be surprised

[PhoenixOne]

Halo was a big console pusher for the XBox. In fact, 5 to 10 years from now, it will probably be the only game most people remember playing on the original XBox.

But you're right, it wouldn't have sold that many Macs. One of the reasons it did so well, IMHO, is because it provided a great FPS experience to people without requiring a $1200+ gaming rig. By the time Halo2 came out, you could buy the system and the game for less than the price of a high-end video card.

Re:Huh?

[T-Bone-T]

Halo 3 was huge because it is at the climax of the story. It can't help but sell. Why do many sequels fail? They are the same character in the same world but with a new story. The old story is done and gone. Halo 2 is a different kind of sequel because it continued the story of Halo: CE and Halo 3 finishes the story. Just by playing Halo: CE and Halo 2 one can figure out the basic premise of Halo 3. The tag line says it all. What would Halo 4 even be about? It would just be a standard sequel.

Most games are a single story. The enemy is introduced, you battle the enemy, you beat the game by finally destroying the enemy. In Halo: CE, the enemy is the Covenant. You battle the Covenant and get introduced to the Flood, which you battle as well. The game ends with the destruction of Halo and the Flood but the Covenant remain, thus Halo 2. In Halo 2, you fight the Covenant and more of the Flood. The game ends with neither the destruction of the Covenant nor the Flood, thus Halo 3. Halo 3 finishes the fight. Then what? Why even go on? The story is over.

Re:Bungie splitting makes a lot of sense ?

[dannannan]

If you want to make games without a manager constantly looking over your shoulder telling you what your game should be like, then it makes a lot of sense.

Bungie relinquished control of Halo years ago when Microsoft bought them. While at MGS, they had to fight constantly for whatever control of Halo they could get. Keep in mind, Halo is a good series, but having Halos and Master Chiefs in your game isn't what makes it great. Just look at single-player Halo 2. Freedom to be creative -- to break all the rules and make something new, unexpected, and fun -- is where great games come from. You have to create the right conditions for that to happen, and that's what Bungie is doing by increasing their independence.

Re:Yea, like releasing more PC products.

[happyemoticon]

That is very true - Halo was used to drive Xbox sales. It's the whole "killer app" phenomenon. The point that needs to be emphasized, though, is not that consumers were losing out, but that Bungie was losing out. They were losing money they would have made if they were not forced to make Halo an almost-exclusive title, and I betcha they lost even more money on that whole "Direct X 10 Only Because We Need to Sell Vista" debacle.

If I was an employee at Bungie, I'd be thinking something along the lines of, "Oh, so look what's happened: we've gone from one of the industry's most respected niche game developers to a subsidiary which exists first and foremost to make Microsoft's shitty products more appealing, not to make great games." Then, I'd be talking to my buddies about leaving en masse and founding a startup studio - and oh yeah, fat chance of releasing anything for the 360. So I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the separation was made to meet the staff halfway and prevent a brain drain.

This may sound a bit passionate, but game developers tend to be just about the most passionate software developers on the planet - you have to be, to endure the rigors and frequent lack of reward. And given that level of passion, I wouldn't be surprised if some people were downright irate over being forced to sabotage something they put years of work into.

Re:Huh?

[Glendale2x]

I wouldn't mind seeing them make Halo into what they wanted it to be before Microsoft picked them up and it got retooled into a console shooter. I was hoping for more Marathon mythos... and I got "just shoot everything to get to the next level".

Re:Nobody should be surprised

[enderjsv]

I don't get it. Where have you ever read/seen/heard that Microsoft was stifling Bungie's creativity. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you think about it. Microsoft paid a lot of money for Bungie. It's not like the abducted Bungie and forced them to be their slaves. It was a two way deal, and it's easy to see why Bungie accepted the deal. With all the extra money, they could do bigger things. It's no lie that building games costs a lot of money.

From the looks of things, it seems that Microsoft is trying very hard to please Bungie. Hell, they're letting them go. How does the saying go, "if you love someone, let them go, blah blah blah". It hardly sounds like Microsoft is being the tyranical Bungie-opressing overlords some people are trying to make them out to be.

Actually, image more than merchandising

[everphilski]

Actually, quite the opposite, Microsoft has been very careful about image with respect to Halo. They have had ideas from all over to tie into the game, from toy guns to lingerie link [neoseeker.com]. But with such a huge player base it is better to be careful and conservative about image and keep the merchandising limited. Profit off of a few key items instead of being a merchandising whore.

Re:I know...

[Locutus]

or maybe the Bungie developers threatened to all quit if Microsoft did not let them go back to being independent. If you notice, they have been somewhat tied to MS Xbox360 and that's not being too independent. The PS2 is still the dominant game platform and the PS3 isn't something to just ignore. Not to mention the Bungie developers might actually want to product a PS3 version because of what that hardware brings.

Just as Microsoft purchased SoftImage only to get them to product a Windows OS version and tried to terminate the UNIX version because the goal was to build support for the WindowsNT OS. In the SoftImage deal, Microsoft ran into major fights with employees over this Windows-only push from Microsoft. Microsoft eventually spit SoftImage back out and they continue to support both *nix and Windows platforms. This Bungie split sounds quite like the SoftImage deal and especially so after hearing how well Halo 3 for Xbox360 sold. You'd think Microsoft would REALLY want to keep control of that kind of money maker and not let the split off to support the other guys.

And who knows, maybe there was quite an uproar from other game vendors because of the ownership of competing game developers such as Bungie? Would really like to know how/why this happened.

LoB

Re:Nobody should be surprised

[Locutus]

Microsoft does these kinds of things to either kill off a product for another platform or to force the new purchase into the wonderful world of Windows. They've been pretty successful at protecting their monopoly in the PC OS market and IMO, Bungie was a way for them to "grow" the Xbox marketshare. If there are profits, it's a bonus but the real reason for all of this is to protect the Windows monopoly. It is there that their 10s of billions in annual profits come from. My guess is that Bungie fought back internally and wants to be on its own again. There is a larger market for games than the Xbox. Over the last 5 or so years, Microsoft is a distant 3rd place in the console market after all.

And WTF? Microsoft is letting Bungie go for love? WTF universe is this?

LoB

Re:Nobody should be surprised

[enderjsv]

I love that the legendary, mythical non-MS Halo game gets respect simply because of what was "promised" by Bungie. You know how the grass is always greener on the other side? That's kind of how I see that mythical game. People "blame" Microsoft for the way Halo turned out and long for this perfect version of Halo that should have been. In reality, the Halo game probably wouldn't have been that amazing. And as for the way Halo did turn out, well, it turned out great. I completely respect the fact that you don't care much for game, but I thinks it's fairly clear that many people do. A lot. I can't say with absolute certainty that I like the current Halo series better than what might have been, but I wouldn't take a chance and change it.