In a recent interview with Next Generation a Bungie employee, composer Marty O’Donnell, made some interesting statements. Among them was the fact that Bungie is currently working on several games that they'll own the IP rights to.
Here's an excerpt from the interview:
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8062&Itemid=2
"How does it feel seeing other developers working on Halo?
On my level, if I write a piece of music, that’s mine forever. If I sell it to this guy over here, now he owns it. But spiritually, creatively, it’s my music. Bungie invented Halo, that’s our baby. Microsoft owns the IP, and we at Bungie are completely aware that that’s the reality of the situation.
It’s possible that if it were completely under our control then we might be thinking about doing different things with the Halo universe than Microsoft is, but that’s a choice we all made. So that’s one of our motivations to say: “For the next IP we make, do we want somebody else to own it, or do we want to be the ones who control it?” We’re Bungie, we’re not Halo, but certainly Halo is our favourite child right now.
So what comes next?
We have incredibly talented people working on brand new games that I can’t talk about. I can say this: we’ll own the IP."
