That's where there's some conflicting views on how much control Sony has over Bungie. Traditionally, a buy out is a buy out and corporate (top of the pyramid) has control.
But when the buy out happened, Bungie management made it sound like they are independent and got control of their own destiny (no pun intended). As part of the buy out, Bungie execs made it sound like they control their own department.
Who knows.
Sony and Bungie just said that Bungie even if inside SIE wouldn't be inside PS Studios but instead would continue publishing as Bungie, and would continue publishing Destiny 2 expansions and future games multiplatform day one including rival consoles keeping creative freedom. As part of Sony's multiplatform strategy.
So basically just bought them to get all the money they make, not only in PS, block any potential exclusive for the competition, and also to use their knowledge, tools and data to support and improve the other GaaS being made at PS Studios.
Then some Bungie fanboys wanked when they saw that and misunderstood it, not knowing how a subsidiary works specially in a publicly traded company, not knowing what a fully owned company means, not knowing that all Sony teams have creative freedom or not knowing Sony's multiplatform plans.
In addition to this, these fans also made up things like Bungie was cancelling PS Studios games, forcing them to change stuff, shutting down studios or demanding them to do this or that game. When the reality according to Sony is that SIE created a Sony Live Services Center of Excellence where the GaaS experts from SIE publishing, PS Studios and Bungie (not only Bungie) would share their knowledge, overview, support and review a few certain GaaS specfic areas (not the whole game) of all SIE GaaS titles (which doesn't include non-GaaS games).
Obviously other than collaborate there, Bungie has no power over any PS Studios game or studio. They aren't part of PS Studios and aren't above them. They are separate SIE subsidiaries that are at the same level. They're just another SIE gamedev studio but having their own publishing label and publishing their games day one everywhere.
In the particular case of Helldivers and Stellar Blade, those are first-party content from third-party studios. What is now called "second party". Sony has been great with those.
PS Studios, managed by Hermen Hulst, has been a shitshow. There's no denying that. Hermen cannot survive this debacle.
Second party games are also first party PS Studios games, and also managed by Hermen.
Hermen released games like Dreams, GoT, TLOU2, Demon's Souls remake, Astrobot, Miles Morales, Returnal, HFW, GT7, GoWR, Rift Apart, Horizon CoM, Spider-Man 2, Helldivers 2. Very successful in sales achieving even historical sales records for any PlayStation exclusive in their history, winning a ton of awards, even breaking the record of GOTY awards. Grew all the teams allowing them to work in bigger games and more games at the same time. Acquired Housemarque, Bluepoint, Firesprite, Firewalk, Haven or Nixxes. Some studios like Insomniac, Guerrilla or Naughty Dog claim that they no longer crunch.
Cancelled the TLOU GaaS that he didn't greenlight and greenlighted ND instead minimum 2 new non-GaaS SP games. Greenlighted games like Wolverine, X-Men, next Ratchet, Spider-Man 3, Death Stranding 2, Kojima's new IP, Bend's new IP (first pitch he received from Bend after DG), Horizon 3, next GoW set in a new mythology, new games from Media Molecule, Housemarque or Team Asobi.
Did put some order in Japan Studio after decades of being a money sink not being able to develop a single good selling game and did shut down Pixel Opus and London Studios, two studios almost nobody cared about. Plus canned a few GaaS more, when people were complaining about GaaS.
It seems to me that he's been doing a great job to me. The opposite of a shitshow.
Btw, Hermen Hulst isn't related to Bungie. He's the head of PS Studios and Bungie is a SIE subsidiary, not a PS Studios subsidiary.