Sony acquires Bungie for $3.6 billion - staying multiplatform

[Fei-Hung]

A few things I took away from the interview:

1) all Bungie games will be multiplatform. Looks like Sony sees this as an easy money maker by adding this studio and immediately getting one of the biggest GaaS games out there and increasing their own brand awareness as it's now a Sony studio.

2) of future COD games become exclusive, Sony will still have their own FPS from Bungie to counter players leaving.

3) shared expertise across studios of they want to make another exclusive FPS they can tap into Bungie.

4) Bungie waves to expand beyond gaming and this matches Sony's road map with PS Studios expanding into movies and series.

5) with auditions of Crunchyroll and Funimation, the option to create Anime is also there.

A big guess here, Sony will partner with Netflix and crush Gamepass by tapping into Netflix's subscriber base.

Sony has a really good relationship with Netflix as they have chosen not to create their sub service, but also made deals with Netflix with Spidey movies. I can see Sony taking this further. There is no better and easier way to get a leg up on Gamepass than to release PSNow on Netflix as an extra tier.

They will take the money and let netflix handle the rest. Unlike Gamepass, this won't be an extra app, so it will be easier to implement and this way they can skip some red tape.

Finally, my last hot take, Sony will use this as MS used the cross gen arguement last gen. Everyone who has been around long enough knows Sony was good with this in the 369 gen and MS didn't want to play ball, but there media and MS made it out like this never happened by the end of next gen.

Although MS started the play anywhere, Sony has joined later, but will keep on this. They are doing this with Bungie and now MLB The Show too, but when they announce the Netflix deal, today will be a huge blow to MS and cause a shit storm when MS hold key IPs like COD, Elder Scrolls and Fallout away from other platforms.