Sony boss says to ‘expect more’ studio scoop-ups in the future

Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan has said that the Bungie buyout won’t be the last acquisition we see from the company.

Sony’s $3.6 billion purchase of the Destiny developer came as a huge surprise this week, but Ryan was quick to point out that it wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction to Microsoft’s juggernaut acquisition of Activision Blizzard. 

“These conversations have been a number of months in gestation, and certainly pre-date the activity that we have seen this year,” Ryan told GamesIndustry. “From our perspective, this is really doing what feels right for PlayStation, and what we feel is the right thing to do to drive PlayStation to places we’ve never been before.”

Bungie’s Peter Parsons added: “This had nothing to do with industry consolidation. This had everything to do with a shared vision and how we could do things better together.”

When it comes to scooping up more studios to plonk in PlayStation’s basket, Ryan said that’s something that will definitely be happening. “We should absolutely expect more. We are by no means done. With PlayStation, we have a long way to go. I will personally be spending a lot of my time with Pete and the team at Bungie, helping make sure that everything beds down right and that autonomy means autonomy. But elsewhere in the organisation, we have many more moves to make.”

Ryan’s energy very much matches that of Xbox boss Phil Spencer, who said in October 2021 that the company was “definitely not done” acquiring studios. “There’s no quota. There’s no kind of timeline where I have to go acquire studios by a certain time,” he said during a Wall Street Journal Tech Live event. “But if we find a studio where we have a good fit, we share what we’re trying to go do and what they’re trying to go do, and if we feel we can both get better together, absolutely.”

The Sony-Bungie partnership is the third major acquisition in under a month. Aside from Microsoft’s $68.7 billion purchase of Activision-Blizzard, Take-Two Interactive bought out the mobile and social developer Zynga for $12.7 billion at the beginning of January.