Bungie: Activision deal will help us reach larger audience

Bungie has told GamesIndustry.biz that it signed a ten year deal with publisher Activision in part in order to reach brand new audiences on new formats.

Traditionally a PC and Xbox 360 developer, Bungie will now work on multiple formats – a prospect it also finds daunting having built an envious portfolio of titles for Microsoft platforms.

"On the one hand it's probably a little bit terrifying because we've come to know the Xbox so well over the past decade," said Bungie's Brian Jarrard of multiformat development. "But on the other hand, as story tellers and as creatives it's always great to try and seek as large an audience as possible to share your creation with and be able to have people experience this universe.

"So it is very exciting for us, the potential to have this new world be shared with more people across more interesting types of engagements and devices than we have in the past is very exciting for us but definitely a little bit scary because it's going to be new stuff. But Activision has a lot of expertise with multi platforms and it was definitely one of many attributes that made them a great fit for our future."

Jarrard said that the recent row with Infinity Ward didn't put the team off signing with Activision, and the timing of the announcement wasn't ideal, but the company wanted to get the new deal out there in order to focus on the looming release of Halo: Reach.

"Ideally the timing maybe isn't the greatest because of all the noise out there right now but for us it's really important that we didn't want to have this happen on top of our Halo: Reach beta which launches next week.

"But in terms of our actual working relationship and the future... we're confident that we have a great deal and all of the things that we wanted to get out of this partnership are in place for us so we can focus on making a great game and knowing that as many people as possible will be able to experience our universe on the device of their choosing," he added.

The developer is still quiet on specific plans for the new IP, but Jarrard did promise that it's an ambitious project, and the ten year deal is in place in order for the project to grow.

"We have some pretty crazy, ambitious, grandiose plans for what we want to do with our next big game universe, our action universe, and how we want that to play out and the types of stories we want to tell and the types of experiences that we want to share.

"So we're looking at that right now as a very long term proposition from the creative and development side. And this deal was structured to basically span that vision and to help us be able to achieve what we want to do for the next decade."

Jarrard also said that he expects there to be a fan backlash on the internet, but pointed to Bungie's previous deal with Microsoft as evidence that the studio ultimately cares about the products it creates.

"I think fans of Bungie, they've stuck through Bungie when Microsoft acquired the company ten years ago and that was perceived to be the end of the world and I think that worked out pretty well for our fans and for the studio as well," he offered.

The full interview can be read here.