Sony Speaks on Bungie Acquisition Disaster, Takes an 'Impairment Loss'

Don't worry, Marathon's out soon. I'm sure that will go well....

I'd love for them to just make a D3 and bring back the franchise to the good old days. I enjoyed D1 more than D2 so please just take it back to the D1 days.

If I paid 3.6 billion I would of taken complete control over the studio right then and there, would it have changed anything? probably not, but anything would of been better then how Bungie operate now (they look extremely lost)

$3.6 billion?! That's just insane...
Imagine all the games Sony could have made for that money, instead of wasting it on buying a studio.

Bungie does seem to be an albatross around Sony’s neck at this point.

It’s so deeply sad seeing the name that gave us the ORIGINAL Marathon, Pathways Into Darkness (deep cut for my fellow old school gamers!), Halo, etc reduced to this.

Out of all the stupid ***** he said, my vote for the stupidest thing Jim Ryan ever said was: "...we believe that Bungie can give us way more than a $69 billion acquisition of Activision."

What an unbelievably moronic thing to say in hindsight.

Guerrilla Games and Bungie should develop a killzone reboot together guerrilla work on the single player campaign Bungie work on the gameplay and multiplayer. I think Bungie a talented team Sony just need to refocus them on making great competitive multiplayer games.

@Exerion76 My god, how many games could they have funded with that money! Ghost of Yotei's budget was reportedly a measly $60 million, and it will make a hefty profit. Funding a Days Gone 2 would have barely made a dent. WTF are Sony's top brass doing?

They worst part is the they let Bunjie take a look at their other live service games and cancelled them at their advice. We lost TLOU Factions because of their advice, yet they can't even run their own live service games well.

Sony should just turn Bunjie into a single player studio like they used to be and get some exclusives shooters.

@UltimateOtaku91 Hot take here, but I think Factions 2 would of been a flash in the pan and then we would have had Naughty Dog stuck baby sitting it for years, with no other IPs coming out.

Well, you win some, you lose some… I do still understand why Sony bought them, as they were at the top of their game at the time they were eyeing them, which would probably be some time early 2021, way before the actualy acquisition. If you wanted a live service studio at the time, they were seemingly one of the best. But they did pay way too much, in my opinion.

Anyway, i think they’ll do much better under Playstation Studios than under Bungie’s management, so personally i’m excited for the future.

@UltimateOtaku91 I would have loved a Factions 2, but it’s hard to say if the call to cancel it was a bad call when we’ve seen nothing from it. It might have been the best call to make. And knowing it would've prevented Naughty Dog from focusing on their single player endeavours, i personally am glad it didn't go through in the end

Knew this from the beginning, bungie dont have a clue on how to create a decent live service. Just recycled garbage, charging a prefer a stale service. Square enix would have been a better choice imo, as they've turned ff14 around

Honest question, because I've never played Destiny, but how would people have handled ending the main story differently so as to retain more of the playerbase?
As an outsider, it seems fairly obvious to me that once the story had finished, you'd see the playerbase drop off significantly.

@StrickenBiged And that's when they should of annouced Destiny 3 with a brand new story/saga, instead we got Marathon.....

Funny how most of us on here thought at the time what a terrible deal it was yet somehow Sony didn’t see it.

Absolute zero surprises here. I still think it was just a knee-jerk reaction to MS’s deals which has turned into a disaster. At least they got insomniac for a bargain.

Just to give a bit more information about Sony's Impairment Loss.

This basically means that whatever Sony can realistically sell Bungie for in the market (so-called Recoverable Amount) is lower than the value of Bungie in Sony's accounting records (so-called Book Value or Carrying Amount).

It's an international Accounting Principle (IFRS or IAS can't remember) that an Asset has to be measured at the lower of its Carrying Amount and Recoverable Amount.

Sony would have employed a team of Appraisers to check Bungie - as an Accounting Asset - for indicators for possible Impairments and to determine it's Fair Value/Recoverable Amount.

IMO, not only did Sony overpay for Bungie, on the face of it, it's been a terrible acquisition.

I really hope Marathon and a potential Destiny 3 can help Bungie get back to what they were in the past.

From my understanding with Sony buying budgie, apart from pursuing live services success was probably a reaction to Microsoft trying to buy the entire industry lol. However I don't understand how they keep mentioning it in the financial reports, I'm not a business person but surely the acquisition is paid of by now. In comparison I don't think Microsoft mentions the Bethesda or Activision acquisitions when talking about the xbox financial reports, so surely that would be even worse for Microsoft given the size of the Activision buy out. Having said that Sony is obviously more transparent about the revenue and profit margins of the gaming division that Microsoft lol

To think we could have lived in an alternate world were Siny bought Square Enix western assets instead of Bungie

@Oram77 Yeah your probably right, just find it funny they let Bunjie make the calls about their live service games. They could have given Bunjie the IP to work with instead and made a multiplayer TLOU Extraction game instead of Marathon.

@TurboTom

Since it was a major acquisition by Sony of a Subsidiary - Bungie - Bungie will always remain part of Sony's Consolidated Financial Statements as long as Sony owns Bungie.

Also, when an Impairment Loss like this occurs, it has to be specifically disclosed in the Financial Statements, so it would be easy for anyone reading these statements to pick up on anything related to Bungie.

@Oram77 They could have opened a new studio to maintain Factions 2, so that they could work on singleplayer games as well in the meantime. Easier said than done, yes, but it would be better than spending 4 years on a live service game, only to realize all of a sudden that you have to support it post-launch.

Literally nothing good has come from this acquisition. Hopefully they can turn it around but I'm not hopeful Marathon will be the turning point. They really need to go back to the drawing board big time.

@UltimateOtaku91 Tbf, i dont think Bungie had the power to make any calls at all. They just had an advising role, i believe. The call was still Naughty Dogs own to make.

Somehow I think the signature level of fidelity Naughty Dog was designing Factions 2 with, was just way too high for a live service, and would make it hard to scale for. I think Bungie fairly recognized this and told them.

And ND probably also noticed that all their resources and teams were being put on Factions, and they werent going to be able to make single player games anymore, and realized that thats not the path they wanted to take going further

@N1ghtW1ng
Thanks for the reply, was just something i was struggling to understand lol. Hopefully Bungie will start to prove a better investment for Sony going further.

@Questionable_Duck I think Sony and Naughty Dog were incredibly naive when they set off to make Factions 2, Bungie did them a favour whether people want to accept that or not. Having a different studio make it may have worked, the beauty of hindsight I guess.

And to people saying this was a knee jerk reaction to Microsoft. I dont think so. This acquisition would have probably been in negotiation a year before the ABK deal even got announced. This really had nothing to do with Microsofts deal, but with Sony’s strategy trying to get in to the live service market

@Oram77 This. Both Sony and Naught Dog were very inexperienced in the live service space at the time they started development. Hearing ND talk about it back then, it was a very ambitious project, in the end it was probably too ambitious.

Still hope they could just give us something akin to Factions 1 though, doesnt have to really change much, just modernize the concept a little bit

Feels like more & more that Jim Ryan was given a tap on the shoulder by Sony's Hiroki Totoki to retire quietly or be fired. How Hermen Hulst as his "yes man", promotion in Worldwide Studios (at Shuhei Yoshida's expense), whom obviously not only pushed it on a clueless Jim but then setup the Bungie heads as an "advisory group",still has his job boggles the mind!🤯
Given the retirements or otherwise in studios like Naughty Dog,Insomniac, Bend & others during the Live service push who'd succeed Hulst is anyone's guess,unfortunately.😕

and what’s hilarious is that halo is coming to ps, so they didn’t even need to buy bungie at all 🤣😂🤣😂

They purchased them because they imagined destiny 2 would be a forever game. It’s a moronic way of thinking because there will never be more than a hand full of forever games. The live service dream is a fools dream!

Well ya know if its rotten cut it off, I wouldnt expect anything great from.this ever again, just going to bleed money, sell it or dismantle it, and put the devs to work on other projects

3.6 billion to lose money on Bungie but sony wont outsource remaster ports for its own PS3 games or get back compat running

bungie make me laugh first they wanted to be independent and left xbox then they ended up getting bought by activision then they decided they wanted to be independent again, then few years later got bought by sony make up your minds!

It is funny how everyone but Sony seen this as a disastrous move.

Bungie only ever had ONE....Count that....ONE...One hit under their belt and it was Halo.....Which did not come with the deal!

Sony buying Bungie, and especially what they paid for them, was the dumbest thing I have ever seen in my 40+ years of gaming.

Pete Parsons and his motley crew took the piss out of Sony on this one, I would love to see if he paid himself some bonuses so he could get more cars for his collection.

The purchase was a joke it really was on top of that add the $400 million loss on Concord a game no one wanted except Herman Hulst and it's been a pretty bad year or more for Sony

They ended up paying $3.7 billion for a company that's isn't even what it was when they bought them. Little Pete Parsons sacked most of the talent while he made sure himself and his little friends kept their jobs. Now Destiny 2 on steam barely had 18k players as of right now 7.15pm UK time it's got 22k playing right now

@Elfuggingjefe all i know is my team will beat your team on your home ice tomorrow night!

@Elfuggingjefe Wow a civil hockey fan. Rare. Therefore its nice to talk to you. I wish Tampa good luck as well. There was a time when Tampa had a ton of ex Rangers there. We used to be good trade partners with Tampa. Mcdonagh is back on Tampa as you know. I loved him. Rangers dished him off way too early.

But yeah, not good starts, but the cream will start to rise after Thanksgiving. Tampa has a great team. Verdict still out on Rangers cause its puzzling how we can go 7-1-1 away so far, but just get our first home win last night. lol idk?

We got Shesty and you got Vaz. Vaz is a beast. So, with having those two goalies, things can look up in a heartbeat my man!

@Elfuggingjefe yeah 100%. What makes me mad is Florida was destined to win the last two cups. They are built perfectly as a team. But now they are decimated with injuries and EDM looks like they are a mess right now too. So the cup seems up for grabs this year, unless Colorado keeps up their torrid pace. That said, its a bummer that our two teams look far from cup worthy when its kind of anyones trophy this year. But we'll see.

One thing i learned watching hockey for the last 40yrs is, anyone can get hot or turn into cup contenders after new years. That was more prevalent in the 80's 90's and early 2000's. Its harder to do in todays game, but still. Never know

@Elfuggingjefe yeah prez trophy always means you suck in the playoffs. Rangers were just victim to this 2 yrs ago. Winnipeg last year, and Winn is always terrible in the playoffs, so they prob should have thrown the last 3 games so Wash would have won the prez trophy. Let it be their problem

Bungie probably one of the biggest reason why Sony doesn't want to buy WB or do big acquisition that cost billions anymore.

@themightyant Yes true that's also one of other reasons why Sony didn't want to buy WB.

Overall WB is a big mess and it needs a lot of time to clean up these mess. Imagine the headache to layoff thousands of people, restructure the company and absorb them, facing the media backlash, and waiting when you can recover billions of your money + profits while maintaning your main company.

And Sony probably learn the lesson what happened with MS after they bought Bethesda and Acti-B.

Remember the market mood before Bungie acquisition? "Oh, Sony is falling behind, Microsoft is on the roll buying publishers and big studios! Sony is going to lose the market unless they do something similar fast!"

Very few had common sense and were doubting Microsoft's strategy.

honestly imo it can still be saved , sony takes over full sony studio which should have been done from the start , take the destiny franchise and make a solo story like game halo. you can even add in some mp stuff , with the story and lore from that series i think it could make a good single player story ip. or go all the way back either make a brand new oni game or remake oni from the ground up for the ps5.