Bungie’s creative lead Tom Farnsworth has let the cat out of the bag about what his studio is doing with Sony.
In a series of tweets, Tom shared a picture of a decorative shield, with this caption:
“This Shield is what 11 years at Bungie looks like. Each medal represents one of the 25+ Destiny releases we’ve shipped to millions of players. During that time we completely changed how we develop games and do business, moving from strictly boxed products to live service games.
And with the support of Sony we are working on a number of unannounced projects too. Come join us!
Also, obviously I’m missing a medal, my kids played with the shield awhile back and I’m still looking for it, lol.”
Sony announced their acquisition of Bungie in January last year. The studio was once owned by Microsoft and was lead developer of the Halo franchise. At this point however, they had already clocked in a few years as an independent studio, making Destiny and Destiny 2 as multiplatform online multiplayer shooters, but in close partnership with Sony.
This acquisition was completed without issues on June of last year as well. Since then, there had been a lot of rumors and speculation about what Bungie would be making moving forward, but so far we only know of their continuing work on Destiny 2.
Tom’s tweets suggest that Bungie’s next projects with Sony are going to be live service games. Of course, we already knew that Sony was going in this direction as they had said so themselves. Their target is a total of 12 live service games, across their own platforms, PC, and mobile, by 2025. We also know about Jetpack Interactive, another smaller studio, working on one such live service game, based on job listings.
Tom’s statement suggests that Bungie is working on more than one of those live service games. As is common among Sony’s studios, they may be already working with Santa Monica Studio and Sony’s other game developers on multiple projects. Since that acquisition only started last year, they may also only be in the preliminary stages of making these games. Unfortunately, that does mean it may take some time before we get any details on any of these projects.
Bungie’s enthusiasm does indicate they have big plans for the future, and so, whether they can reach those goals or not, we may be looking forward to three to five Destiny-like video games from Sony in the future.
Source: Twitter via Video Games Chronicle