A new IP from Bungie – potentially the secretive Matter – is “expected to launch in 2025”, Microsoft documents suggest.
“Matter?” Richard E Grant asked in the cult classic, Withnail & I; “Where’s it coming from?”
The answer, of course, is Halo and Destiny developer Bungie. A new intellectual property from the Chicago-based studio, word of Matter first emerged in a 2018 trademark filing. Since then, however, the project has remained shrouded in secrecy – though thanks to some documents that have emerged in the FTC-Microsoft legal case currently underway in the US, we may have a potential release window.
As spotted by IGN, a company overview of Bungie – taken from an internal document at Microsoft – says that “As of 2021, [Bungie] has more than doubled its headquarters space and plans to open a new studio in Amsterdam by 2022 for ongoing support on Destiny 2 and development of a new IP, currently expected to release in 2025.”
That new IP, the document – a “Quarterly Pipeline Review,” linked here [PDF] – reportedly states elsewhere, was thought to be Matter.
Bungie also has another major game in the works, Marathon – though this is essentially a revival of a 1990s Apple Mac game rather than a “new IP”, so unless somebody at Microsoft had their wires crossed when they wrote the words above, it’s certainly possible that the game they’re referring to is indeed Matter.
To date, nothing official has emerged from the Matter project; all we have to go on is a 2020 job listing that talked about a “comedic” new IP filled with “whimsical characters”. Bungie also received $100 million of investment from Chinese publisher NetEase in 2018; there was speculation for a while that the two firms might be collaborating on Matter, though all that’s formally emerged from the deal so far is word of a Destiny-themed mobile game.
Microsoft’s Quarterly Review document is dated April 2021, though, so it’s quite possible that its content is out of date. Said document has provided a veritable goldmine of news snippets this morning, however, including word that Microsoft had plans to buy Sega about three years ago.
