Bungie explains Activision deal

Yeah, I'm not going to lie, timing was certainly something we discussed, but like I mentioned the long form agreement was just signed this week so it was... and we have our beta coming up and we didn't feel like it was fair to the Halo community and frankly to our friends at Microsoft and to our own team to have this news overshadowing a really momentous occasion for Reach. So we had a really short window to work with.

I agree the landscape's a little bit volatile right now, the timing is definitely interesting, but I feel like it is what it is - we want to get this news out there. We're really excited that we have a secure future that aligns with our creative vision, and we just want to get back into doing what we do, and have our team focus on making games. When the time comes we'll have a lot of new time to show, and at that point Bungie's next game and next IP will start to speak for itself.

No, it doesn't, and I definitely don't want to comment or speculate. I think I probably know as much about it as you do - we all read the internet, it's hard not to follow it, but we're pretty comfortable. We have a great deal with Activision, I think a couple of key points for us again is we're a fully independent company, we're not owned by Activision, we're not first-party for them, we're still our own studio, and we still own this IP for ourselves and have creative control to make the games we want to make. So, not that we would have concerns about being in any sort of situations down the road, but I feel like we're entering into this partnership on the right foot and have a really great mutual understanding of where each of our groups will plug in in the future.

No, absolutely, we will still maintain our culture, we will still maintain our voice and our identity, and our community's a huge part of that. Frankly speaking I think Activision, certainly when they're looking at a partner like Bungie, beyond just our development track record and our predictability and our ability to generate sales off of quality games, our built-in community and our rapport and that relationship that we have is a huge strength to our studio.

I know for a fact that not only will we continue doing that but that they are counting on us to do that. It's really important to us that every aspect of our game from the experience that people have in their homes to the way we sustain the game and talk about it... we want to make sure we're controlling and all of that and our voice rings true and through this partnership that's definitely the way it's going to go.