Highlights
- Insomniac Games has a strong track record with PlayStation exclusives like Marvel's Spider-Man, which showcased the studio's passion for the character and delivered a great gaming experience.
- Insomniac's deep love for various Marvel characters could result in more exciting games featuring heroes like Doctor Strange or Daredevil, which would be highly anticipated by fans and likely successful commercially.
- However, focusing too much on Marvel games could potentially lead to the loss of original IPs like Ratchet and Clank, and limit the studio's ability to explore new ideas. Additionally, non-PlayStation users would miss out on these Marvel games due to Insomniac's exclusive partnership with Sony.
For the last 27 years, Insomniac Games has continued to put out a consistent stream of great games, and while a lot of those have found their way to a lot of different platforms, most of Insomniac's best titles have been reserved solely for the PlayStation. Spyro the Dragon, Resistance, Ratchet and Clank, and now Marvel's Spider-Man; Insomniac Games has had a long history with Sony, and that relationship is only getting stronger with time, with two more PlayStation exclusives well on the way.
Landing on October 20, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is one of the most anticipated games of Fall 2023, and following that, Insomniac is set to release Marvel's Wolverine. Much like Rocksteady was for DC, Insomniac is quickly becoming Marvel's biggest video game partner, and with a third game apparently being in development over at the studio, there's both upsides and downsides to it being yet another Marvel title.
The Upsides of Insomniac's Next Game Being Marvel-Focused
Over the last five years, Insomniac has well and truly proven that it's capable of handling the Marvel license. One of the hottest brands in the world right now, Insomniac released Marvel's Spider-Man at the very height of the MCU's popularity, and it didn't fumble the bag at all. With a stellar story, great characters, excellent combat and the best web-swinging fans have experienced so far in a video game, Marvel's Spider-Man was truly a great video game, and the semi-sequel Miles Morales only continued to cement the fact that Insomniac was the right choice for the job.
If there's one thing that Marvel's Spider-Man and Miles Morales made clear, it was just how passionate Insomniac was about the Spider-Man character and all of his surrounding mythos, with the studio putting its own unique spin on the lore but keeping plenty of vital elements and delivering a ton of well-earned fan-service along the way. And with Insomniac now working on Marvel's Wolverine, it's pretty safe to assume that the team has a love for all things Marvel. So, if Insomniac's third in-development project is another Marvel game, it'll likely be another passion project, and that's exactly what Marvel's video game department needs right now.
Insomniac clearly has a deep love for a wide assortment of Marvel characters, and there are plenty of heroes that the developer could make an excellent game out of. Doctor Strange, Daredevil, The Punisher, Moon Knight, and the rest of the X-Men are all characters that deserve their own video game adaptation, and if Insomniac's third game revolved around any of these, there's no doubt that fans would be happy. Further, there's no real doubt that the game would be an enormous commercial success right out of the gate.
The Downsides of Insomniac's Next Game Being Marvel-Focused
But the biggest downside of Insomniac's next game being a Marvel one is that it'll potentially lose some of its original identity, and in the process, it might end up forgetting about some of its most beloved original IPs. Long before Marvel's Spider-Man, Insomniac Games was best known for its work on the original Spyro the Dragon trilogy, the entire Ratchet and Clank franchise, and fun experimental one-offs like Sunset Overdrive. If Insomniac is developing a third Marvel game right now, then it could end up being locked in a Marvel-only cycle, and the developer still has so much left to give when it comes to returning to those old IPs, or delivering completely new ones. Beyond that, Insomniac Games being a PlayStation exclusive studio means that Xbox and PC users would be missing out on yet another Marvel video game.