Bungie reclaims Destiny franchise, splits with Activision

It seems that Bungie has reclaimed its Destiny. Not metaphorically, I mean they actually reclaimed all the rights to Destiny, their shooter-MMO hybrid, in a recent split from publisher Activision-Blizzard. This split comes after a tumultuous relationship between the two companies after they signed a ten year publishing deal back in April of 2010 that has now ended four months short of a ninth anniversary. Considering the last time Bungie split from a publisher they lost the rights to Halo to Microsoft, it’s not surprising that this time they’re a lot happier with this break up, as any and all new Destiny games and all rights to the current game franchise as a whole have reverted back to them. This includes the often speculated upon Destiny 3, and any other games in the series that might come into existence.

However, you won’t be seeing Destiny 2 removed from the Blizzard launcher any time soon, according to Blizzard’s CS team in the EU. So if you’ve been playing Destiny 2 via the launcher, that shouldn’t change — or at least if it does, it won’t be for a while yet.

It has to be pointed out that Bungie was never owned by Activision-Blizzard nor was in any way part of the company. Bungie deciding it wanted to go its own way was as simple as terminating the publishing contract between the two companies — while it’s possible that Activision-Blizzard might have been able to retain the publishing rights as Microsoft did, I’d assume Bungie probably put some language in the publishing deal to protect itself after the last time they parted ways with a publishing partner. Either way, if you’re looking at this news as a template for any future developments, there’s a big difference between a contract to publish a game vs. being part of the corporate structure of a large company.

Both Activision-Blizzard and Bungie have mentioned that Activision will be focusing on IP it owns for future development, so I’m fairly certain this was a development both companies saw coming for a while. If you’re playing Destiny 2 via the launcher, hopefully you won’t have your gameplay disrupted too much, at least not for a while yet.