More and more, I’m realising that Sony overpaid big time for Bungie, they could get smaller Studios like Arrowhead and get very good results with their GaaS initiative.
One of the reasons of the Bungie acquisition was to use Bungie's knowledge, tech and expertise to help, support and bump the other GaaS Sony was making, like Helldivers 2. It has been a massive sucess.
Anotther reason was to improve Sony's 1st party revenue outside PS, it obviously also heavely improved thanks to Destiny 2. The other reason was to get the future Bungie games. So far Marathon announcement video broke Youtube records, meaning there's a ton of people interested on it.
They didn't overpay Bungie, it's working as expected or maybe better. As they keep releasing these GaaS titles, including the various ones Bungie has under the works, it will be clear that the Bungie acquisition was a great deal and the paid little for them.
When PC ports were coming out years ago, nobody would had believed day one PC ports would come, yet here we are in 2024. Helldivers 2.
Helldivers 1 was also released in PC almost at the same time.
Their centre of excellence did essentially have remit to greenlight or recommend reworking / cancellations. Advise on processes of monetisation, content roadmaps, possibility of fast tracked scaling.
I don't give Bungie much credit for Arrowhead putting out a great game. Bungie consulting is about helping Sony studios with their GAAS games road maps. The CEO of Arrowhead put out a tweet last night saying the road map has entirely changed for HD2 since it became a huge hit. I'm not sure if Bungie people ever saw HD2 before release, but they sure didn't convince Sony that it was going to be a hit
In fact, I would not be surprised if Bungie views Arrowhead as competition. HD2 now standing on their lane with it being PvE. Good thing one's single player and the other is third person to help differentiate the player bases a bit
Sony shown the list of tasks of the Live Games Center of Excellence does (where there isn't only Bungie, there's SIE Publishing and PS Studios too), and to greenlight or cancel games or recommend game cancellations wasn't included there. It wasn't included there to review its gameplay or fun.
It was limited to review and support the GaaS specific areas from the game development like the ones you mention: specific game design & concept review (meaning to have a GaaS friendly engaging loop for long term play), monetization and KPI data tracking review, preproduction pipeline (it's different from non-GaaS titles) review, launch readiness, post launch review (post launch content roadmap, KPI tracking, server stuff, etc)
The SIE Live Service Center of Excellence (which includes Bungie, but isn't limited to them) also overviews their post launch strategy, meaning that Helldivers 2 will have a proper post launch content roadmap, which pretty likely was already designed, budgeted since years ago, and pretty likely even started to be developed before launch, as usual in GaaS.
After release, depending on performance, these post launch content plans keeps being tweaked periodically to add, remove or even shutting it down. In this case, it is being an insane success, so they'll invest more in post launch content and will have more ambitious content.
But being a GaaS is synonymous of having post launch content planned before release, whey won't just to start now to decide if they add stuff or not, or trying to figure out what to include, or hiring people to do it.
Before launching the game they'll have a roadmap of stuff they want to include in different major and minor updates. But depending on performance, the amount of stuff put there may evolve.
. Absolute no-brainer.
