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Sony Interactive Entertainment will acquire ‘Halo’ videogame creator Bungie in a $3.6 billion deal, the companies said on Monday…

making it the third mega-merger this month in a wave of consolidations sweeping the gaming sector.

Earlier in January, Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard, the creator of “Call of Duty,” for nearly $70 billion and “Grand Theft Auto” videogame maker Take-Two made a deal for Zynga, the creator of “FarmVille.”

Ethan Gach is a senior reporter at gaming site Kotaku. “There's a lot of what the tech world is doing is driving some of this, you know, that Microsoft already has a beachhead in gaming. Sony is obviously extremely reliant on it increasingly as other parts of its business sort of shrink. And so I think they look around at Google and Amazon and Facebook now with its huge pitch for the Metaverse and are kind of basically seeing how can we keep getting bigger in order to face up against these other potential competitors from outside our industry?”

Bungie, which split with Microsoft Corp and became a privately held company in 2007, will join Sony’s PlayStation family.

It has worked on a number of popular gaming titles including “Marathon” and “Myth.”

The company now plans to hire more talent across the studio for “Destiny 2,” a videogame previously published by Activision Blizzard.

The sector is on course for a new record of $150 billion in deals, financing, and IPOs this year, according to investment banking firm Drake Star Partners.