There I am, washing up plates in the DR Studios kitchen (no it’s not part of my job) when one of the staff members mentions something about Bungie. Being that my hearing is not great, I didn’t pick everything up, but I did hear “MCV” so I decided to check out my RSS feed. What I saw pretty much blew my mind away...Activision signs Bungie
“Publisher Activision has signed a ten year deal with Halo developer Bungie that grants it worldwide publishing rights to a future multiformat release.”
The news has pretty much taken everyone by storm and shaken up the game industry. There will be others that don’t really care, though even they will have been initially surprised. Then again, the T2G students haven’t made a fuss about it in either the thread I made or the IRC chat. As for everyone else, it seems they can’t stop buzzing about this.
You only need to look at the Eurogamer comment section to see just how much this has got people talking; in just one hour and thirty minutes, 131 comments were made! Note: as of this time of writing, the number of comments is at 218.
Now it must be said that this deal if for one –yes just one – new IP for Activision to publish on any platform. After that, Bungie is free to free to develop new games for new publishers. And if your thinking at the prospect of seeing Halo appearing on the PlayStation 3, because Microsoft own the rights to the franchise.
With the initial excitement and surprise inside me having died down, I’ve had time and some clarity to think about the situation, so here’s my take on it.
This is a message to everyone that they the recent turn of events may have knocked them down, but they aren’t in any way out of the publishing game and still have a lot to offer.
It also makes Activision look less like the bad guys (which seems to be the way they have been portrayed by some gamers and video game journalists), because why would Bungie sign a deal with Activision if they actually did not give out royalties? Regardless, this is a good coup for Activision.
Source: http://www.mcvuk.com/news/38765/Bungie-could-still-make-more-Halo
