Insomniac Trapped Itself In The Marvel Machine

Last year, ransomware group Rhysida hacked into Insomniac Games and stole a historic 1.6 terabytes of data. Among the files which are still being unpacked today was a roadmap detailing all of the titles it has planned for the 2020s—only one of which isn’t Marvel.

It’s painful to watch a talented studio that played a pivotal role in defining the early years of the PlayStation with icons like Spyro the Dragon and Ratchet & Clank becoming Sony’s de facto Marvel machine. In past years, it was able to experiment with more interesting projects like Song of the Deep, Sunset Overdrive, and Resistance alongside its legacy sequels, but by the end of its Marvel line-up, it will have spent over a decade on nothing but superheroes and old IP.

In 2025, we’re getting a Venom spin-off, followed by Wolverine in 2026. Jump ahead just two years and Spider-Man 3 will swing onto the scene, followed by Ratchet & Clank the next year, and X-Men the year after that. It’s ambitious in today’s world of ballooning development cycles and budgets, but if we trust the roadmap, we won’t have a “new IP” until 2031 or 2032 at the earliest.

The PS Plus Classics catalogue is bringing back a slew of traditional RPGs, mascot platformers, and other genres we typically don’t see PlayStation approach these days, and people are lapping them up because Sony has pushed further and further into the over-the-shoulder cinematic storytelling that’s long since grown stale. There’s a fervent hunger for a wider diversity of genres that were nipped in the bud with the PS4 generation that isn’t being met.

Insomniac has proven it can make great FPS games, slick movement-based open worlds that mix skating and zombie carnage, tight-knit metroidvanias, and of course, mascot platformers. But instead of tapping into that breadth of genres which cultivated an incredibly interesting library over the years that people so clearly want to see more of, it has a roadmap that feels like it was ripped straight from a D23 MCU phase line-up.

We know that it specifically asked for Wolverine, so it probably asked for X-Men as well, but it’s the same sinking feeling as watching your favourite director get pigeonholed into comic book movie after comic book movie, knowing that they could do so much more. It’s especially frustrating when the cracks are already beginning to show.

Spider-Man 2 was a sharp drop in quality from the last two games; the open world is uninteresting, the photorealism proves even more ill-fitting (and dull) for a studio like Insomniac, and the story is somehow both bloated and rushed all at once. Churning out this many Marvel games in such a short time frame will only exacerbate the problem, especially with spin-offs thrown into the mix. It’s not a healthy dev cycle. It’s gaming’s answer to the MCU, with Insomniac being the ones caught in the eye of the storm.