Bungie

Bungie

Basic information
Founded	1990
Legal Structure	Subsidiary
Industry	Video Games
Also known as
Official website	https://www.bungie.com

Founded in 1990 by Alex Seropian, Bungie is a game development studio that has been known to develop games for their popular franchises, such as Marathon, Destiny, and initially Halo. Originally, the company exclusively developed for MacOS platform, but after being acquired by Microsoft, Bungie was seen developing instead for the Xbox platform (and 3rd parties such as Gearbox Software handling ports to Windows), until its departure shortly after Halo Reach's release. In January of 2022, the company was yet again bought out, this time by Sony Interactive Entertainment.^[1]

• User freedom: Historically would revoke content consumers paid for.^[2]
• User privacy: Unknown
• Business model: Software sales, microtransactions
• Market control: Microsoft (Xbox), Nintendo, Valve, indie studios

This is a list of all consumer-protection incidents this company is involved in. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the Bungie category.

Near the release of the Destiny 2 expansion "Beyond Light" (November 2020) Bungie announced the vaulting of paid content. This meant that said content for the game was going to be removed and made inaccessible.^[3][4] This included story lines, playable activities, and locations that players were required to pay to access. This also affected equip-able items to a different extent as they would no longer drop in the game limiting you to only being able to use weaker versions of that gear. Vaulted content includes but is not limited to:

• The Red War campaign (Base game story)
• The Curse of Osiris expansion (Paid DLC 1)
• The Warmind expansion (Paid DLC 2)
• The Forsaken expansion (Paid DLC 3)
• Seasonal content (Paid battle passes that came with story & gameplay content, were vaulted on a yearly rotation where each year 4 battle passes would be released which could be paid for as a bundle or separately)

Since vaulting was announced, some content was un-vaulted including the Whisper and Zero Hour exotic missions,^[5] seasonal exotic missions in the exotic mission rotator, and seasonal activities in the portal.^[6]

Inside the Bungie "Limited Software License Agreement" (LSLA)^[7] since at least August 17, 2021, there is binding arbitration, which takes effect the moment any user has run any Bungie software since the introduction of this term.

Additionally, Bungie can, and has taken advantage of a stipulation^[8] within their forums which states:

"By using the form, you are submitting content to Bungie. When you submit content to Bungie, you agree to the Bungie Services Terms of Use, which also means you're promising us that you have the right to upload that content, that we can freely use it without condition, and that you agree that your submission follows our Code of Conduct."

A highlight from this agreement

"...that we can freely use it without condition..."

has been cited by consumers^[8] as a reason why a piece of user-generated content^[9] was used commercially within Destiny 2.^[10]

• Marathon series
• Halo series (formerly)
• Destiny series