Oh! So Sony is buying stuff now? Okay.

 Destiny Dark

Okay, now it's time to start ringing those "Monopoly!" alarms, because we are on the verge of something very troubling indeed. It seems I'm not the only who thinks so either, as the FTC are at least looking into that whole 69 Billion dollar Activision deal that was written up from earlier this year, although it's questionable what will actually get done considering most in positions of power over in that country are so uniformed about the world of gaming that they're still trying to figure out how people are fitting an entire arcade cabinet in their little living rooms. But that doesn't stop the actual industry consumers, folks like you and I, considering the impact of having two or three large companies gobble up the world's supply of game design talent and independent studios in order to put them all to work as cogs in some grotesque exclusivity pumping machine. And yes, I know the various promises everyone is making, but we all know how this will really end up going, now don't we?

So in a move that shouldn't really surprise anyone at this point, but which still caught me blinking the morning gunk out of my eye so kinda blindsided me, Sony have declared their intentions to buy Bungie for a little under 4 billion dollars. And saying 'a little under' when talking in the billion sounds wrong, but in the grand scheme of things perspective just goes out the window. (It was 3.6 billion, by the way.) Now my first raw reaction to this news was "Oh my god, Sony just bought Halo!" before remembering that is absolutely not how that works, Halo is owned by Microsoft through 343 and has been that way for a long time now. Still, Sony get another potentially just as huge series (maybe not in number of games but certainly in popularity and potential to compete) in Destiny. And with that the huge purchase bar sort of makes sense. 3.6 Billion for a half a billion dollar-to-make franchise? It seems somewhat reasonable. (I actually don't know how much was spent on each game there, maybe Bungie still have some of those initial development funds left over and this shows a great appreciation in value on Bungie's end.)

And right away I think we can all look at this deal and agree it's a bit- ironic, wouldn't you say? Not in a 'big bad guy about to monologue about the futility of the hero's compunctions' kind of way, but in a 'how funny you ended up going out with my ex after all we've been through' sort of way. Bungie hit it's big stride working alongside Microsoft in order to give the Xbox one of it's flagship, icon-generating, series back in the early 2000s. They were Microsoft's bulwark against the slightly more established and industry-connected 'Sony' of the time, and together they wriggled a place in the current gaming Triumvirate we all still venerate to this day. After that golden period, Bungie moved on to become independent developers working on publishing through Activision Blizzard. Yes, the very same Activision Blizzard that Microsoft just bought! However that relationship broke down a year or so ago so Bungie just narrowly missed falling under the umbrella of their old masters once more.

It's within these independent years, however, that the seeds began to be planted which makes the news of this year not the most 'out of nowhere' twist of all time. You see, whereas one might think that Bungie would cater towards the Microsoft ecosystem with their new series, given the decade of hard forged experience they had with Xbox, in truth it was Sony and Playstation which would come to enjoy the majority of Destiny's love. It's hard to say exactly why this is, but given that the COD series trended to the same way until Microsoft recently snatched it up, I'd put my suspicions on 'influence from Activision Blizzard'. (It was Bobby Kotick in the dining room with a contract stipulation.) Playstation would get early access to weapons, preferential treatment and even an exclusive Atrike dungeon and multiplayer map! That stuff would make it's way to Xbox, but in a few weeks before Destiny 2 launched. (Well thank you so much, Bungie; giving us the table scraps the day before you move out. How utterly magnanimous.)

With this incorporation into Sony proper, it's safe to say that we're going to be seeing more deals like that trickling forward in every substantial future Destiny release as well as whatever game series Bungie looks to make in the near future. (I suspect we might be seeing a more single-player premium-focused brand-new exclusive from Bungie now, as that seems to be the cost of entry into a Sony relationship.) And to be clear, Sony have mirrored the same statements made by Xbox in that both promise neither of these series' (COD or Destiny) are going to suddenly be pulled from competitor's consoles. Not sure if I believe all that, but assuming it's true, this means we're definitely going to start seeing modes, and dungeons and basic game elements, get stripped away from these games so they can provided to the audience of their respective chief pay master's audiences as 'bonuses'. That's just business-based design choices 101; it's inevitable.

How it this going to effect the landscape for gamers in general? Well it's going to make the experience of cross platform users even more disparate than it already is and encourage this fetid sense of class differences between the two that already permeates. It's clear that these tactics are nothing that Microsoft or Sony have marked themselves too good for, and the experience of one side or the other is going to suffer for the cause of corporate mandates. I remember learning of the Strike being kept out of my copy of Destiny and feeling like a second class citizen within this game ecosystem. As in, just because I didn't 'buy the right console', suddenly my money just wasn't as valuable as other player's. A game already lacking in content was now even more sparse for me, someone who loved to go on all the new Strikes. At the end of the day, it's all too easy for some players  (often large swathes of them) to end up as the losers in these territorial bouts, and it really shouldn't be this way.

In Belgium there was a little headline doing the rounds wherein a store that was selling Playstation 5s attached a warning to the isle telling people not of scalping, not enforcing a one-console-per-player mandate, but ensuring people knew that Activision was now owned by Microsoft, and if that would effect the purchasing decisions that would be something people needed to know. It's always a shame when these supposedly huge and confidant companies need to resort to underhanded guerrilla tactics in order to influence players to their consoles, rather than trust in the merits of their machines in what is supposedly meant to be the most 'diverse contrast in console hardware ever in a generation', but it's a forgone conclusion that this is how console makers work at this point. Even brick and mortar retailers recognise and are informing their customers that this is the way these manufacturers are, and we as customers need to be wary.

So the rich get richer and the walls that divide us grow one parapet taller, at least out the other end of this Bungie have had a suddenly influx of an obscene amount of money which they can now wisely invest into new ways of nickel and diming players over event engrams and shaders or whatever this free-to-play new Bungie is up to next. And now it's not even facetiously that we ask: which huge gaming consolidation move is going to happen next? You know, Nintendo haven't gotten in on all the action yet, so I'd say my raised eyebrow is on them. If I were the Big N, I'd be eyeing up Square Enix in retribution for the way they betrayed me back over the original Final Fantasy 7 all those years ago, see how they like making some family friendly exclusives in recompense. But I'm not Nintendo, I'm just another penniless gnat watching giants on piles of gold shower themselves with praise, playing some huge obtuse game of strategy and crushing wide swathes of the consumers as they go. (All of which is fine as long as they remember to chant "It's for the players!" eveey fifth move or so.) What a glorious mess we're all perpetually in.