Bungie is a good dev....it would be nice to have them developing for other platforms.

Unfortunately MS will always pull the strings for bungie, since they own them.

 yeap yeap yeap and marahton and oni and the rest lol :D

and once again Bungie is an integral part of Microsoft corporation.... they can't leave without having MS kicking them out of the company...... Bungie is part of Microsoft game studio which is part of microsoft corp. is that clear enough to erase every doubt in the mind of people ????  

Well with MS's current plan of developing 360 exclusives using independant studios  under contract it makes some small sense (Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey from Mistwalker).

Microsoft has become notorious at subcontracting things out, hell a ton of current MS employees in Redmond are temps under contract, that way MS doesn't  have to worry about benefits and overtime pay. For videogames it basically means that if a project goes overbudget MS isn't footing the extra cash, if the game takes to long to develop MS can have financial penalties in the contract and if a game doesn't sell well MS is only out $20 million or so not that plus whatever has been put into the studios followup project.

That said this article looks like your standard near worthless internet rumor.  

 DS games.

MS wants to trounce Sony entirely so I imagine they would take vindictive pleasure in Halo DS or something similar. 

Team XBox seems to have an inside scoop...

http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/14693/Rumor-Bungie-Is-Leaving-Microsoft/

There will be news before October 12th with Bungie it seems...

Twesterm; you called bungie and asked them about this? lol next time you talk to them ask em if I can get lunch with bill gates sometime

Microsoft is a great sugar dady for Bungie, but at the same time they essentially won't let Bungie do anything but Halo. I think Bungie has said on more than one occassion they're getting tired of the pressure of Halo and living up to expectations of sequels that quite frankly couldn't deliver past the first instalment.

But without MS they'd just be another leaf in the breeze and could easily sucuumb to the same woes of Silicon Knights.

You people do realize that Bungie more than likely just had a publishing deal with MS for those three games right? Bungie more than likely had the option of extending the publishing deal and simply chose to decline it so they could do their own thing.

They've made some very well received games, they have a lot of experience, they've made a large amount of money, and they are well known. They won't have too much trouble finding another publisher or just funding their own game.

I thought MS owned Bungie:

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/06/22/ms.bungie.idg/index.html
(old article where MS BUYS Bungie)


It would seem more likely that they would sell Bungie off, than just let them leave. I guess the other scenario, is that when they bought the company, many of the founders/employees were signed contracts to stay with the company for a certain amount of time, maybe those contracts have expired and key employees want to move on, so they've reached some sort of compromise.

 Hmm, I had always assumed MS bought Halo and had a publishing deal with Bungie, guess I was wrong there.  Still though, I believe in the rumor.  :-p