Home wrecker?
This Bungie-leaving-Microsoft rumor refuses to die, even though Hickey rubbed his magic lamp and attempted to get to the bottom of it yesterday. Now we’re left with more idle speculation.
It’s like this: allegedly, some members of the Bungie staff are all Halo’d-out and would like to get involved with a different project. Microsoft, which owns Bungie, is interested in making money, and in case you didn’t hear, Halo equals money. From here we can go in a few directions. One, Microsoft can offload Bungie and get on with its life, which isn’t likely. Two, Microsoft can let Bungie go but demand that it get right of first refusal for any subsequent games. (Bungie wants to make Fun Game. Before it pitches the game to Activison, EA, OtherBigPublisher, it has to pitch to Microsoft first.) That seems reasonable to me. Or, the Bungie staff members who want out can just quit and form a brand new studio. That’s not exactly easy to do, you might imagine.
So where are we today? Honestly, pretty much the same place we were yesterday, just with more wishy-washy “we don’t comment on rumors” quotes from Microsoft/Bungie reps. Very exciting.
Bungie-Microsoft Split Rumors Persist [Shack News]