A third of Sony’s $3.6 billion Bungie fee will be used to encourage employees to stay
Employee shareholders will get “deferred payments”
Sony has revealed that a third of its $3.6 billion acquisition of Bungie will be spent on employee retention.
As part of its February 2022 earnings report for Q3 2021, the company showed a slide explaining that of the $3.6 billion being put aside for the deal, around $1.2 billion of this will be used to reward existing employees, as long as they don’t leave.
Because Bungie isn’t a public company, the majority of its shares are owned by its employees.
Since one of the main reasons for Sony’s acquisition is to make use of Bungie’s knowledge base, it plans “to incentivise the shareholders and other creative talent to continue working at Bungie after the acquisition closes”.
According to the report: “Approximately one-third of the $3.6 billion consideration for the acquisition consists primarily of deferred payments to employee shareholders, conditional upon their continued employment, and other retention incentives.
“These amounts will be paid over the course of several years after the acquisition closes and will be recorded as expenses for accounting purposes.”
Sony expects that around two-thirds of these payments will be made in the first two years after the deal is finalised.
It was announced on Monday that Sony is set to purchase the Destiny studio and Halo creator, which was once owned by Xbox parent company Microsoft.
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However, after the completion of the deal, Bungie will be “an independent subsidiary” of the PlayStation firm and remain a multiplatform studio.
In addition to ongoing work on Destiny 2, Bungie previously announced plans to bring at least one new IP to market before 2025.
Sony has also stated that plans to harness Bungie‘s experience in the live service space going forward, with Sony planning to ship 10 live service games by 2026.
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