At the end of last month, Sony (SONY -0.43%) made a big splash in the video game world by announcing it was acquiring Bungie, the creator of blockbuster game franchises Halo and Destiny, for a whopping $3.6 billion. In this episode of "The Gaming Show" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on Jan. 31, Motley Fool analyst Jon Quast and Fool.com contributor Jose Najarro discuss the Japanese conglomerate's possible plans for its new acquisition.
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Jon Quast: So let me put this acquisition in context here, 3.6 billion. Obviously, this isn't as big as Activision Blizzard, what Microsoft just acquired a couple of weeks ago. It's not as big as Take-Two acquiring Zynga. But those are the biggest and second biggest video game acquisitions ever. This is the seventh biggest, from what I'm seeing. Just here in 2022, we have the biggest, the second biggest, and the seventh biggest video game acquisition ever. I mean, this looks like just major positioning right now. It's a land grab almost. What is this?
Jose Najarro: Yeah, I thought this was pretty interesting. I do think Sony has a strength over Microsoft so far. Maybe it might change with this Halo streaming TV, but I do believe Sony does really well at moving either one of their franchises into the big screens, or one of their big screens into the gaming market. They own part of Spider-Man and obviously, there's other big players, Disney, who will help with the creative, but Sony I know it's a big player in the Spider-Man franchise in the movie front. They also are just releasing Uncharted, movie with Tom Holland, who is also the character of Spider-Man, and that's also a Sony-based game. I wonder if Sony is acquiring Bungie, maybe they're mainly known for Destiny 2, for Destiny. Maybe they might be trying to go into some form of movie content with this strong franchise, which like you mentioned, the online sales has over a 1 million global players. The other thing is, I do believe here, Destiny 2 is one of those few games that really did super well. What I call the massive multiplayer online gaming, where a lot of people are playing at the same time. Some style of metaverse, to some extent. I wonder if Sony is buying them for the technology behind them. Maybe they want to incorporate some of the technology that Destiny 2 has used in the past for future games. So 3.6 billion, I think it was a great move for the potential where Sony can go with this.
