Bungie Leaves Microsoft
- 2
- Add a Comment
On October 1st, Microsoft released Bungie, who just released the fastest selling game of all time in Halo 3, from its ownership, making Bungie an indie game company again. Microsoft still owns a small portion of the company and still has the rights to the Halo franchise. Microsoft purchased Bungie in 2000 prior to the release of Halo: Combat Evolved.
On Bungie’s Web site, the company released the following statement:
“We’ll continue to make Xbox 360 games, and we’ll continue to make amazing games for Microsoft Game Studios, In that regard, nothing has changed. All that has changed is that now Bungie Studios is once again, the property of the folks of Bungie Studios.“
This shouldn’t be bad news to Xbox 360 owners like myself, it just means that other gamers will get to enjoy the great games Bungie produces. Remember Halo will still be Microsoft property so don’t freak out! Halo 3 is not coming to PS3 or Wii any time soon.
So what do you think of this? Is it good for the industry? Bad for Microsoft?
2 Comments
Anthony Kinyon
October 5th, 2007
at 4:20pm
This is making big news in Mac circles since Bungie used to be a Mac-only game company.
See:
http://www.macrumors.com/2007/10/05/bungie-splits-from-microsoft-mac-games-ahead/
and
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/10/05/its_official_bungie_breaks_free_of_microsoft.html
There is lots of speculation that Bungie will start doing Mac games again (but also still be releasing Xbox 360 and Windows games as well).
Microsoft retains a minority stake in Bungie, but no longer owns the company. MS also retains rights to the Halo franchise intellectual property, as I understand the agreement. There is a Mac version of Halo, but not Halo 2 or 3 at this time.
Samarkov
July 6th, 2008
at 2:51pm
I think that most companies this successful should separate like this. This way, they have complete control of their company, and still can make loads of money.
~~Samarkov