The studio say they’ve an ”awesome deal” with Activision, and that they’re ”hands-off” with the team. It’s a ”great relationship” so they’re ”not too worried”.
”Not only were we excited about the contract that we were able to get with Activision but they seem really committed to being hands-off,” said Bungie composer Marty O’Donnell.
”They really seem committed to agreeing that they are the publishers and they need to support in all the ways publishers support and they were looking for developers that were completely self-sufficient essentially - except maybe we need some money once in a while - but self-sufficient in terms of not needing to depend on them for production or development or some of these other things.” Bungie is free of Microsoft’s shadow to go ‘indie’.
”They want a team that has a proven track record - a team that can go out and get it done,” he continued. ”And so the hands-off nature of it is really appealing to us. Right now, maybe this is the honeymoon period, but it seems like the right thing for us at this time.”
”We have an awesome deal with those guys,” he said.
”Ultimately, I don’t think it’s going to matter who helps that game into the hands of gamers, other than we’re happy to know Activision’s got world-class publishing expertise across multiple platforms and they’re going to be a great partner that’s given us a great relationship and a great deal. So we’re not too worried about it.”
Bungie has signed a 10-year publishing deal with Activision but the Halo-creator will keep all rights to their newly created property to do with as they wish.
”How many publishers are out there that could even do a deal with Bungie for a decade? You could probably list them on one hand. Certainly Microsoft was one of them, EA was one of them, but you could think of the ones that could actually do this thing.”
Very little has escaped Bungie on what their next project is. Lead network engineer David Aldridge joked at GDC that it was an MMO action title. Rumour has the team working on a first-person MMO called Destiny, which is described as ‘WoW in space’.
