Baby Come Back: Microsoft Reportedly Tried To Strike A Deal To Purchase Bungie, Destiny IP

If you’ve read my blogs for any amount of time, you’ve probably found me praising those maniacs at VentureBeat for their absurdly on-point coverage and ability to scoop up… Well, y’know, scoops, for quite some time.

Nothing’s changed this week, as their GamesBeat podcast has done it again – this time unveiling (around 1:17:00 in the video below) that Microsoft has repeatedly tried buying out Bungie, but the price was too damn high.

Bungie famously split from Microsoft on October 5th of 2007. They became a privately held independent company thereafter (leaving Microsoft with ownership of Halo), and inked a decade-long publishing deal with Activision three years later.

Plenty of rumors have swirled for years about the disagreements between Microsoft and Bungie, and the GamesBeat guys touch on that a bit saying that Microsoft would “love to patch things up” with Bungie and get back on their good side. Bungie has also been pretty candid about their disagreements with Activision, and have implied several times that their vision for Destiny was very different than what Activision wanted.

All of this amounts to little surprise that Bungie would be reluctant to re-join Microsoft (who acquired like 5-6 smaller studios in the last three years), and that they probably asked for quite a pretty penny (perhaps an amount they knew Microsoft wouldn’t pay) to come back into the fold.

You gotta pay to play, Phil.

Destiny 2’s fifth expansion, Beyond Light, drops on pretty much every platform except Nintendo Switch on November 10th, 2020.

P.S. – Cue the music!