Well…
As someone who’s been on both sides of an M&A and on due diligence teams. This is normal.
Doesn't really matter what form it takes. Value is value.
Google says "900+" employees as of 2022.
It's not bribe money, it's incentive so people don't retire or go start their own game company or even any type of copmpany. People leave companies after getting acquired espcailly if you own shares and reaped the rewards. A bunch of these guys are getting millions of dollars when the deal goes through. Look at a lot of game studios over time and look at how many founders and key people have left over time. It's happened to companies like Naughty Dog, Bioware and Rare where a bunch of key people left because they had a shit ton of money to do other stuff. It's same reasaon why CEOs get such big bonuses/raises becasue you don't want them gettting bored of the job or taking what they made so far and going out. $1.2 Billion obviously is over multiple years and not given all at once but a fraction at a time. IT's common for big companies to throw money at people to keep them if they think they are important. Microsoft for example gives their top non-exec employees hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep them from switching to toher companies.
Possibly.
Not at all. I’ve said some of the reasons purchases don’t work is because A) you’re buying old IP and B) the talent can just leave. It happens all the time in acquisitions.
A signficant percent of it will go to top talent. The CEO of Bungie is likely getting a big part of it and across multiple years. The deal likely lasts 4 years MINIMUM , might be even longer becasue game projects have extremely long dev circles. It's not a lot when you realiaze top execs at toher companies make a shit ton of money and if you don't want people to leave you have to pay them compeitively.espcailly the people who just got really rich from owning private shares and could just go start their own restaurant, retire or do something random. If you just got $50-200M dollars you aren't as incentivized to work another year for another $1M compared to if you were offered $10, 20,30M. You gotta incneitvize them to stay. that's why you hear about CEOs getting their compensation double sometimes because they don't want them to get bored and go off and do something else so you entice them with money. You also don't want them being offered $2,3,4,5 million to go work for another game company. You have be compeitive too.
The online infrastructure of Destiny is nothing short of genius. It's practically an MMO that runs almost 100% on P2P networking, with barely any real servers behind it. Bungie are the only studio to have managed to do it at that scale.
At least read the post first before posting any fanboy comments.
Ha! Too late!
Bungie just got bought out for literally billions. If some of the leads split and go make their own new IP and hit it big, they might all be billionares in a few years.
Talent means nothing, if you can't retain them.
Bungie is useless without top bras talents.
MS bought it 2002. They had their big success in 2017. That is a long time in the gaming industry. They basically waited OG xbox, xbox 360 and mid xbox one to have a big hit.
Doesn't it? Imagine what MS will have to pay to keep staff at Bethesda and AB?
It doesn't tell you anything. Do you think Sony is the first or only company doing this eh? Imagine keeping the talent at Bethesda and AB?
Completely agree.
Game of last 2 generations?!!!
When you think about it, though, GaaS games aren't just about coding in terms of raw technical coding wizardry, but also marketing and entrepreneurship. You'd be surprised how long the game industry as a whole has progressed when these two skillsets were not only separate, but often held by people internally opposed to each other. (IE: SoJ vs. SoA during the 90's was for the most part "Skilled artistic coders that can't sell anything vs. expert salesmen that can't figure out how to generate a decent chiptune". Nintendo during the NES-N64 era was ran by Yamauchi a corporate guy who gradually lost touch with the developers which is why certain things turned out how they did and he was replaced by Iwata.)
Why?
The leadership of Bungie are probably taking 75% or more of that
