In a deal naming almost no specifics, Bungie Studios, a wholly owned unit of Microsoft's Microsoft Games Division, becomes the privately held Bungie LLC, with minority Microsoft shareholding and a long-term Halo publishing deal.
Here are more links to articles on Bungie's bombshell announcement:
Nobody asked Bungie about the rumored separation in the thread for this week's update, but Frankie dished on it anyway. Effective October 1, Bungie is an independent company with a long-term publishing agreement with Microsoft Game Studios for Halo games.
GameDailyBiz interviewed Frankie about Bungie's new status.
Kotaku conducted a short email interview with Brian "SketchFactor" Jarrard to find out what's next for Bungie.
7th Columnist reposts the press release and invites community comments.
The Hushed Casket also reposts the press release, with reader comments.
8bitjoystick, who broke the story originally, gets to say I told you so.
For other stories, see:
Mainstream media have also picked up the story:
The Macintosh press is having a field day with the news, given Bungie's track record as an independent game developer with its roots on the Mac platform:
There's not much commentary yet, but John Dvorak weighed in, apparently just before the announcement went public.
Louis Wu at HBO responds with wonga as he is wont to do. There are also threads (one, two) in the HBO Forum.
On behalf of Rampancy's founder, Ferrex, I'll say zang as I'm sure he would have, or perhaps even has at some time in the recent past, deep within Bungie's headquarters for world domination. Perhaps even kudos are in order.
SketchFactor has posted a press release on Bungie.net that declares that Bungie Studios will become a privately held company. Bungie LLC will have Microsoft as a partner and a minority shareholder and will continue to make games for the Xbox.
Daniel Radosh at the New York Times laments the dependence of games on cinematics for storytelling, and alleges they are stunting the medium's development of its own storytelling vocabulary.
While I agree in principle with his point, essentially this is just another "pig pile on Halo" story; since it's the biggest release in the vicinity, it's used as a touchstone for everything that's wrong in gaming, even when there's little connection between that game in specific and the topic at hand.
Halo 3 zoomed from its first day US sales of $170 million to a first week total of $300 million, according to GamesIndustry.biz. It was also heavily played on Xbox Live, garnering the top spot:
Microsoft stats reveal that more than 2.7 million people have played Halo 3 over Xbox Live in the past week, with the first day of release seeing a total of 3.6 million hours of online play, increasing to 40 million hours by the end of the first week.
Yowza. There are no unit sales figures yet, but if the average price of Halo 3 was, say, $90, to account for a distribution of Standard, Limited, and Legendary editions, that's 3.3 million copies. If there are fewer Legendary editions than Standard and Limited, then that number goes even higher.
Most people long since acceded that Halo 3 would sell well, and it has. The big question for the platform, though, was whether it could move consoles; whether it could take back some of the ground gained by the Nintendo Wii since it launched last year, as well as ensure they'd stay ahead of Sony's lackluster PlayStation 3.
Early indications are that the answer to that might be "yes".
Spong is reporting that Chart-Track, a market statistics aggregator, says that during Halo 3's launch week Xbox 360 sales doubled compared to the previous week. Even more unexpected, Halo 3 topped the Japanese software charts, which perhaps goes to show that there's nothing out there for the Wii that people don't already have, and just plain nothing out for the PS3 yet.
This is the most definitive link I can find for what is so far a non-story story about Microsoft somehow letting Bungie become independent again.
The official Microsoft response to reports in Jacob Metcalf's blog that allege Bungie is leaving Microsoft was:
There's been no such announcement.
That's the kind of non-denial denial you'd expect from a company that is the subject of so many non-story stories.
Todd Bishop, on his Seattle Intelligencer blog, gets Robbie Bach at Microsoft to comment on that non-denial denial, and ends up getting an explanation of why the non-denial denial exists:
"The problem is, I can't comment one way or another on any of these rumors. Because then, every time you ask me a question about a rumor, I have to comment definitively, and there's times when I don't want to, and times when I do want to. I just don't. You should interpret it that way. You should interpret it as a neutral 'don't.' "
All in all, it seems very likely that people in Bungie might want to, you know, work on a game that isn't Halo, or isn't a shooter, or, God forbid, isn't a Halo shooter. Farming out Halo Wars to Ensemble and Halo Chronicles to Wingnut seemed to me like Microsoft setting up the Halo franchise to continue while Bungie moved on to other things; but perhaps it was just a move to try and maximize the revenue from the Halo property by developing ancillary products with a series of Halo shooters at the center, developed by Bungie.
...almost. Demand for the service the day of Halo 3's launch stressed the system to its limits, making it slow or inaccessible for many, according to Next-Generation.
Microsoft labelled Halo 3's launch day as the "most active Xbox Live gaming day in history" after more than a million people had been logged playing Halo 3 online. That may be the case, but there were many others who weren't able to get in on the action.
I'm betting that any part of those problems that isn't solved yet, will be soon; XBL play is too much a part of Microsoft's plans for the platform in general and for Halo 3 in specific for them to continue for long.
GameGuru interviews Mohit Anand of Xbox India, who makes some pretty ludicrous sounding sales claims for Xbox 360:
GG: How is the Xbox 360 currently doing in India?
MA: Good question! As per your survey, all of us would be out of our jobs. Your survey says 1500-1600 units. If that were the units that we sold, I guess we’d all be out of our jobs. We don’t disclose figures on a nationwide or a region wide basis. All we can say is that worldwide were are now close to 16 million units sold, which is more than all of the other next-gen consoles that have been launched today.
That's funny, since the last claim from Microsoft I saw was around 12 million consoles worldwide, 4 million short of the 16 Anand claims. Plus, you have only check the night map on the Halo 3 page at Bungie.net to notice that however many Xbox 360 consoles there are in India, there are precious few of them online in Halo 3. Not even 1500-1600; at the moment of this writing, there are none showing.
That's what BeyondUnreal forum poster Quaz51 asserts that these screenshots he's taken illustrate.
If true, might this be the source of all the cantankerousness over Halo 3's "not quite next-gen" graphics?
Kotaku says that Halo 3 sold out in at least one store in Japan. Who'd have thunk it?
According to Microsoft, the Halo franchise's latest installment has shattered one-day entertainment sales records again; Halo 3 did $170 million USD in its first day of sales in the US.
The Seattle Post Intelligencer wonders if Halo 3 can 'turn things around' for Microsoft's Xbox 360.
While I know from personal experience that copyeditors are sometimes pressed for time, I'm still at a loss to understand that headline.
TeamXbox has the story of Montreal animation studio damnfx, tapped by Bungie to help produce some of the in-engine cinematics of Halo 3.
"Having recently worked on two large format stereoscopic films for IMAX theatres, it was refreshing to focus simply on delivering outstanding animation, while letting Bungie's Halo 3 game engine worry about lighting, rendering and compositing the shots!" said damnfx executive producer Peter Skovsbo.
damnfx's work apparently applied to about 20 minutes of Halo 3's cinematics; the game is purported to have less cinematic footage overrall compared to Halo 2, with more plot points being revealed during scripted events.
That's the question posed on the latest podcast at C|Net. With Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's Xbox 360 vying for the spot of top dog among next generation consoles, Microsoft has to be counting on their flagship franchise, Halo 3, to provide that final push to original Xbox owners to pony up for a 360. Will it be enough? We'll know soon.