One of the news that has most monopolized our favorite media recently was the acquisition from Bungie from Sony for 3.6 billion dollars, with media coverage, given the escalation of acquisitions that are adding up in the very last period. A few hours ago, however, a report by the well-known journalist Jason Schreier he added some interesting details on the matter, also citing Project Spartacus.
After all, the acquisition of Bungie was a decidedly very interesting move by Sony which invested a substantial capital towards a development house quite atypical for its standards, given that we speak of the original creators from Halo for Xbox. Although many of Bungie’s devs have in the past left the studio and moved into 343 Industries, in the group of fathers of Destiny remain great experts in the FPS genre.
Moving beyond the specificity of the situation, with the Japanese giant buying one of the studios that has been his for years “Competitor”, many have wondered about the reasons for this action, which was also paid very dearly, given the figure. For Jason Schreier the answer would lie in Sony’s attempt to build through Bungie a new commercial battle front to Xbox and yours Xbox Game Pass.
We had already talked about the so-called some time ago Project Spartacus, which currently still has a provisional name, and which promises to be a competitor of Microsoft’s subscription service. We must however clarify that as also expressed by Schreier himself, that Sony’s project will be much more content in the offer of titles per day one, not being able to bear all the related costs.
In fact, launching day one titles with a subscription is in most cases a loss-making operation, but which promises to recover the capital spent thanks to the increase in the number of subscriptions, perhaps thanks to those titles launched immediately. A similar case occurred with the single player campaign of Halo Infinite which is available to all subscribers since launch day at no additional cost.
This system is extremely expensive, but it should allow substantial long-term gains, just think that according to what Schreier himself reported Xbox Game Pass subscribers would even be over 25 million.
As mentioned, however, it seems that Sony cannot or does not want to bear these costs and consequently the acquisition of Bungie would mark the real desire of the Japanese company to focus on game as a service, which if they have a very large installed base, and which are capable of collecting enormous earnings, with limited investments. This is the case with Destiny 2 which has improved a lot patch after patch and now has a respectable installed base.
It therefore seems, in the opinion of Jason Schreier, that Project Spartacus could very much exploit this component of games as services, with perhaps some of the expansions already included in the ticket price for the subscription. However, at present they are all speculations and we invite you to take them with a grain of salt, pending official confirmation or denial from the parties concerned.
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