Report: Sony saved Bungie in 'emergency acquisition,' studio may have closed otherwise

If Sony hadn't bought Bungie years ago, then there's a good chance that the studio wouldn't be here today.

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New reports indicate that Bungie may have been on the verge of shutting down prior to Sony's acquisition in 2022. The info comes via Bungie's former well-liked community manager Liana Ruppert, who says that the studio was in dire financial straits prior to the buyout. Sony essentially made an "emergency acquisition," Ruppert says.

"Bungie was below the red line before the Sony acquisition. If it wasn't acquired right then, the studio was very close to shutting its doors at the very least on Destiny. It was an emergency acquisition," she said on Twitter.

While the acquisition might have bought enough time to launch Marathon and hopefully improve its situation, Bungie's financial problems haven't been solved. Multiple quarters of underperformance from Destiny 2 and the newly-launched Marathon resulted in a disastrous $750 million+ impairment charge recorded against Bungie's assets.

This effectively reduces Bungie's overall power as a group, and while it's technically owned by Sony, the developer is a limited-integrated subsidiary that operates in a more independent manner insofar as creative control as well as finances. That may have changed, and it's possible that Bungie is now more run by Sony than it is by the actual developer.

Sony's $3.7 billion acquisition contract includes stipulations that Sony may dissolve Bungie's board of directors should earnings fall below certain thresholds. Some time ago, Sony CFO Lin Tao said that Bungie's independence is "getting lighter," potentially indicating that its PlayStation Studios organization may be absorbing or planning to absorb Bungie at some point.

It's also worth mentioning that the $3.7 billion buyout included a $1.2 billion employee retention clause. If that wasn't met, then Bungie was only paid $2.5 billion, and it's unclear what the studio's current asset values are like given the impairments from Destiny 2 and Marathon.

Bungie's problems aren't just because their games didn't do as well as they had hoped. Part of the issue lies in the spending that was done throughout the years, including spending hundreds of millions of dollars on HQ upgrades and opening up a new studio in Amsterdam, with all the associated costs of new hires also added to the total.