Bungie and MS split coming?

[Smoke]

Eat me.

[A Black Falcon]

63 pages now...

Seriously though, whenever independent developers are bought by big companies, bad things almost inevitably eventually happen... I could list examples, but there are so many of them that it's not worth it. This does surprise me given how successful Bungie has been with MS, but if they don't want to just be "the Halo company" and MS does, I definitely could see that as being grounds for a split... developers often want to do more than their big corporate parents want them to. You'd think that with Bungie's level of success they'd have the freedom to do as they want no matter who owns them, Blizzard-style, but obviously not...

[Great Rumbler]

Shocking, if true.

[Sacred Jellybean]

There's no way Microsoft is letting go of that cash cow. They'd be all kinds of stupid to not compromise in some way - any way - whatever it takes to keep them on board. Maybe they could placate Bungie by letting them create a few different games before returning to Halo.

[Smoke]

Or maybe MS thinks the Xbots will eat up anything with the word Halo in the title Bungie or no Bungie.

[A Black Falcon]

Well, they do have Halo Wars coming... a console-specific RTS? There have been a few decent ones, but wouldn't Ensemble be better spent on PC games?

[Dark Jaguar]

If that games XBox exclusive and is any good, they better add mouse support.

[Dark Jaguar]

I chalk it up to a rumor.

And now, the luckiest grenade throw in the history of video games. Even if you don't play Halo, if you have any experience with FPS games you'll get what's going on here. The only note I need to add is these "plasma grenades" stick to whatever it hits, such as people.

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/10/04/todays...ade-throw/

[A Black Falcon]

That is lucky, isn't it...

[Paco]

It happened
Bungie is independant
Microsoft owns the Halo IP
Bungie still has a publishing deal with Microsoft
Microsoft gets rights of first refusal on future Bungie games and properties
Microsoft owns around 45% of Bungie

Effectively, it's the same as before.

[Great Rumbler]

Yeah...that's hardly independent.

[Paco]

Yeah...that's hardly independent.

Yeah, but both parties got what they wanted in the end. Bungie gets their creative freedom and backing from a publishing giant, and Microsoft reaps the rewards of keeping an ace developer happy. As Bungie said, it really is a win-win situation.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft happy with multiplatform development. Ultimately, it would make Microsoft money seeing as how they'll get a return on whatever Bungie makes. Seeing as how they're having Rare develop DS games, I'm rather expecting it. An "independant" Bungie could potentially be worth far more than an internally-owned Bungie.

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, MS still has a lot of power over Bungie, but not total control, so that is a difference... but as I said, this stuff always happens, one way or another. This is one of the less damaging such occurances I can think of, really. I mean, normally the way it goes is either 'the founders of the assimilated company quit in unhappiness over what has happened to their studio and subsequently the big company loses the studio's unique qualities' or 'the big company closes the studio, firing everyone'... Bungie was maybe heading towards the first of those (given how with their success the second wasn't exactly likely), but the managed to compromise and end up with this deal. And they still get the first chance at Bungie's games.