Bungie Signs 10 Year Publishing Deal With The Devil

Bungie, the highly acclaimed developer of Halo and its many sequels has signed an exclusive publishing deal with the one and only Activision.  In 2007, Bungie separated from its parent company Microsoft to become its own entity, however they continued to crank out Halo games exclusively for Microsoft.  Today Activision, home of Pitfall Harry, announced that they can come to an agreement with Bungie to be the publisher of their titles for the next 10 years.  Obviously this doesn’t include the Microsoft owned property Halo: Reach.

This is great news for Activision, since their top FPS developer Infinity Ward is vigorously bleeding out all of its talent.  For Bungie, this means multiplatform development and them finally abandoning the Halo franchise.    At face value, this looks like a sweet deal all around.  Activision however, doesn’t have a good track record for playing to developers strengths.  Its widely known that the ‘Vision likes their franchises to be annual and with this publishing deal being 10 years long, Activision is going to want to get as much money out of the deal as possible.

The deal supposedly took 9 months to cement, so hopefully that was filled with contract negotiation that would give Bungie a nice amount of power in the partnership. Now Bungie has to look forward to developing on the notoriously more difficult PS3.