Sony Interactive Entertainment said on Monday that it had agreed to acquire the video game maker Bungie in a deal valued at $3.6 billion, as the game market further consolidates around some of its biggest companies.
This month, Microsoft announced a $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and Take Two Interactive reached an agreement on an $11 billion purchase of Zynga.
Sony Interactive Entertainment, maker of the PlayStation game console and a major game developer in its own right, said Bungie, the original developer of the multiplayer shooter games Destiny and Halo, would operate independently and have free rein to publish games for other consoles and platforms. But the move could help Sony reach new game players.
“This is an important step in our strategy to expand the reach of PlayStation to a much wider audience,” Jim Ryan, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s president and chief executive, said in a statement.
Sony and Bungie did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000, and its signature title, Halo, helped turn Microsoft’s Xbox console into a major game platform. But the developer split from Microsoft in 2007 and stopped making Halo three years later. Since 2011, Halo has been developed by 343 Industries, a company owned by Microsoft.
Now, Bungie will be acquired by Microsoft’s biggest rival in the game console market: Sony. Bungie’s most popular current game is Destiny 2, which is available on multiple platforms, including the Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation.