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Bungie and Activision Announce Exclusive, Worldwide Partnership.

The story of Bungie is wild, winding, and full of majestic wonder. We’ve treaded many pathways over these last nineteen years. But for all the twists and turns we’ve taken, we’re still doing what we set out to do from the beginning, back when the whole of “Bungie Software Products Corporation” consisted of two friends operating out of a basement in Chicago:

Making kick ass games that we want to play.

And as Bungie has grown, the industry’s best and brightest have been totally accretive to our own creative margins. It’s no secret that while the full might of our studio has focused on making Halo: Reach, another core team, led by our co-founder and Studio Creative Director, Jason Jones, has already begun laying the groundwork to bring our newest universe, stories, and characters to life.

Today, we’re poised to open a new chapter in Bungie’s history—one that begins with a partnership between Bungie and Activision and ends where we always knew it would, with World Domination. Our Next Big Thing now has a concrete path, leading from our studio to the platforms of our choosing. The business formalities are behind us. Our Constitution remains unchanged. We are still Bungie, still independent, and now we are free to bring our stories to an ever bigger audience.

Next up, the most ambitious game we’ve ever made, Halo: Reach. Built upon ten years of experience developing the Halo franchise, we’ve assembled the best team, the best technology, and the best talent to ensure that Reach is the game our fans deserve. Strap in and buckle up tight, we’re sending our baby out with a bang.

Once the smoke clears, all the pieces will finally be in place for Step 7. Don’t worry, though. We won’t let World Domination go to our heads. We’re gonna keep making kick ass games on our own terms, and since you’ve been so supportive throughout the years, we’d love to bring you along for the ride.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BUNGIE AND ACTIVISION ANNOUNCE EXCLUSIVE, WORLDWIDE PARTNERSHIP

10-Year Alliance Expands Global Reach for Leading Game Developer Across Multiple Platforms

Kirkland, WA and Santa Monica, CA – April 29, 2010 -- Bungie, the developer of blockbuster game franchises including Halo, Myth and Marathon, and Activision, a wholly owned subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, the #1 online games publisher (Nasdaq: ATVI), announced today that they have entered into an exclusive 10-year partnership to bring Bungie’s next big action game universe to market. Under the terms of the agreement, Activision will have exclusive, worldwide rights to publish and distribute all future Bungie games based on the new intellectual property on multiple platforms and devices. Bungie remains an independent company and will continue to own their intellectual property. Additional terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The groundbreaking alliance will provide Bungie its first such partnership since splitting off from Microsoft in 2007, significantly broadening its global reach by providing the resources and support to develop, distribute and release games worldwide on multiple platforms and devices.

Activision will broaden its portfolio with a new franchise from one of the industry’s most creative, successful and proven studios, whose games have sold more than 25 million units worldwide. To date, Bungie’s Halo games have generated approximately $1.5 billion in revenues, according to The NPD Group, Charttrack and GfK. Activision expects this agreement to be accretive to its operating margins as of the release of the first game.

“We chose to partner with Activision on our next IP because of their global reach, multi-platform experience and marketing expertise,” said Harold Ryan, President of Bungie. “From working together over the past nine months on this agreement, it is clear that Activision supports our commitment to giving our fans the best possible gaming experiences.”

“Bungie is one of the premier studios in our industry and we are extremely pleased to have the opportunity to work with their talented team over the next decade,” stated Thomas Tippl, Chief Operating Officer of Activision Blizzard. “Bungie has developed some of the most compelling and successful games, multiplayer experiences and thriving fan communities, and this alliance underscores our long-standing commitment to foster the industry’s best creative talent. Our unprecedented partnership with Bungie will enable us to broaden our pipeline of exciting new games as we continue to strengthen our industry position and pursue long-term growth opportunities.”

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Bungies Multi-Platform Project may not be a Shooter

When Bungie announced in April that it was at work on a brand new intellectual property, the big shocker, naturally, was that games based on that property would be published by Activision, effectively committing the once Microsoft-owned studio to platforms beyond the Xbox 360. But there was a smaller, subtler surprise to be found in the phrasing of the press release: the new IP is an ‘action game universe’.

To anybody halfway familiar with Bungie’s output over the past decade, the ambiguity was a little telling. Just ‘action game’, then, guys? Not ‘first-person shooter’ or even ‘shooter’ full stop?

Chatting with VGD at a Halo: Reach preview event yesterday, Campaign Designer Niles Sankey has confirmed that Bungie is now exploring beyond the bounds of the genre it helped popularise. He was unable or unwilling to say, however, if any particular kind of experience had taken the studio’s fancy.

‘I can’t talk to you about genres at all, unfortunately,’ Niles told us, ‘I can just tell you what are philosophies at Bungie are, whether you’re looking at Halo, or even before that looking at Marathon or Myth – the studio fundamentally starts out by building and crafting a universe, that we think is rich and interesting and has depth to it and then we proceed to tell stories and build games in this universe, and that’s exactly how we’re focussing on our next ten years.

‘You can look forward to us carrying forward a lot of the core pillars of our studio, and integrating them into our future projects, but we’re not quite ready to pin down a genre yet.’

Bungie hasn’t left its fans totally in the dark, however. The studio helpfully announced via a job listing earlier this year that it was looking for writers who specialise in ‘branching or non-linear narrative experiences’, together with a ‘Player Investment Designer’ who will ‘give players long term goals to invest them in the world and their character’.

According to Gamespot, all this pongs strongly of action role-playing game. For our part, we don’t think branching storylines and character/world investment are the sole province of RPGs, but there’s no denying that the two go hand in hand rather often.

Look out for our thoughts on Halo: Reach itself in a jiffy.

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Bungie visit complete. Their next game looks a lot like Geometry Wars.

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There was no way around it. Sometime at Joseph Staten's talk this morning at GDC Online, titled "Writing the Whirlwind," somebody would ask a question about Bungie's next project. Bungie's writer and design director knew it was coming, too, and had already warned the audience at the beginning of the session that he wouldn't say word one about the developer's plans for its first post-Halo game.

But Staten just couldn't help himself.

After lamenting that Bungie spent ten years creating a mega-universe that players only experienced for six to eight hours at a time (he's only talking about the single-player campaign here, of course), he dropped this wonderfully cryptic springboard for debate: "Wouldn't it be great if we could make a world that was always there for you?"

So, what does that mean? It sounds like Bungie wants to make sure that after it does the heavy lifting with world building, the player then gets the keys to the proverbial kingdom. Could this be a persistent universe without a set beginning and end, where players control the course of the narrative rather than following a set story with a three act structure? Staten offered nothing else, but it was enough to set the speculation machine in motion.

Read more: http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/112/1…l#ixzz11bAmQEhR

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Also during the video, Bungie offered new hints about the project, revealing what might be the first screenshot from the game. Pictured at right, the image shows a vast landscape with a metal-looking windmill in the foreground.

Lastly, Bungie concluded the video documentary with a familiar logo. It was first seen in May when dummy corporation Podophobia Entertainment filed a trademark for Destiny, rumored to be a MMOFPS, with the accompany logo (above). Adding to the veracity of the logo, Bungie staffer Johnathan Barnes was spotted wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the same logo at a Penny Arcade Event.

Zitat von »Shaggy Summers«

ign hat heute gegen 15:30 übrigens einen Live.Stream.

Ich bin gespannt