Two weeks ago, Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard King for an eye-watering $70 billion. At the time, I wrote about why this was a bad thing. Not a bad business decision, but bad for us as players. Bad for the state of media conglomeration. Bad for gaming, collectively. As a result, a lot of Xbox fans called me a shill. Get ready to have those green and black socks blown off, because you aren't going to believe what you're about to read. Sony just bought Bungie, and that too is bad. Maybe I'm a Nintendo shill, who knows?

It's important to note that the two acquisitions are not in the same league. Bungie cost $3.6 billion - still a huge number, but you'd need to multiply it by 19 to come up to the ABK price. Bungie also makes a single game - Destiny. It makes a lot of money, sure, but ABK has its own Destiny in Call of Duty. And Overwatch. And World of Warcraft. Previously, of course, Bungie made Halo. While the press and public may be guilty of making the console war into a much more personal battle than just two very rich companies trying to make money, it's hard to imagine this isn't an attempt to be one in the eye for Xbox. Destiny (and the money it makes) is the draw, but by all accounts Sony was caught on the hop by the ABK deal. Everyone expected them to strike back, buying Square Enix or Capcom or Just Anybody, and that anybody seems to be Bungie.

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I've never brokered a deal worth $3.6 billion, and it seems like you'd need longer than two weeks to be in a place where the deal could be announced. But it also seems like a very deliberate reaction. Everyone expected Sony to buy someone and now it has.

Destiny 2 Vanguard Zavala

But what does Sony buying Bungie mean for Destiny? By the sounds of it, not a lot. Just as Call of Duty is set to stay on PlayStation for the foreseeable future, Destiny will remain cross platform. In fact, Bungie is an independent subsidiary and will retain the option to self-publish, and will retain creative control over Destiny. It's set to make a new IP, and we don't yet know how that will release, but Sony paying $3.6 billion for Destiny's profits and a single exclusive is not the seismic shift that Microsoft acquiring ABK was.

Jim Ryan, however, has said that Sony is not done. More acquisitions are coming, and this is where it gets bad. Buying Bungie to blow a raspberry at Xbox/make huge money from Destiny (cross out whichever you feel is appropriate) is just a business move. I don't like media conglomerates buying up everything, but some good can come from the relatively small moves. Insomniac only got to make Spider-Man, the most fun game of the last gen - there I go shilling again - because Sony owned both Insomniac and Spidey and someone had the brainwave to put them together.

Marvel's Spider-Man posing on building

If Sony plans to make a lot of little acquisitions though, or goes for a big one in Square Enix or even EA, then we start to see the ripple effects of the ABK deal. Ubisoft feel like a solid bet to remain independent, given that it prides itself on being a family business (which leads to nepotism and other issues, but that's for another time), but other than that we could be looking at all the other triple-A studios batting for the Greens or the Blues in a few years time. That's bad for all sorts of reasons.

As much as studios may say they will retain their identity and creativity after an acquisition, it's harder to take risks when you're part of a conglomerate. It should be easier - you're playing with house money rather than having to remortgage your own house. But it isn't, because there are several boardrooms of mostly white men in suits who will discuss and analyse your every creative decision and repackage it in the most commercialised way possible. When your game makes peanuts, even if it costs only pennies, you're always in danger too. Microsoft could reverse some internal ABK changes, but Vicarious Visions was rewarded for its fantastic revivals of both Crash Bandicoot and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater by becoming a support studio for Call of Duty. Some day soon Sony Bend or Media Molecule might be a support studio for Bungie.

Orbs - via Bungie

If you're on Team PlayStation, the Bungie buyout will sound exciting. The other team just scored a goal, and now you scored a goal! Hooray! But you aren't on Team PlayStation, and no amount of Kratos tattoos will ever get you drafted. You are on Team Give Corporations Money. If you want to pretend it's a sport and your team is winning, go for it. But to be clear - you are not. You have not won here, and if Sony keeps buying up studios until the gaming landscape is just indies, Nintendo, Ubisoft, Xbox exclusives, and PlayStation exclusives, you've lost. We've all lost.

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