Insomniac Games is not going to have a very merry holiday season. The Marvel’s Spider-Man and Ratchet & Clank developer was recently hacked and hit with a ransom demand for its data. The company refused to pay and now what appears to be their entire internal file system is online for anyone who wishes to peruse it.
This not only includes a lot about Marvel’s Wolverine, but a huge amount of information on unannounced games, including the roadmap for their Spider-Man sequels. More depressingly it also includes personal information for the studio’s employees. Make no mistake, this is a catastrophic hack for Insomniac and they have our full sympathy.
That said, the curtain on Spidey’s future on PlayStation has now been pulled back and the genie is out of the bottle. With Tom Holland recently sending shivers up the spine of MCU fans by refusing to confirm whether he’d be back as the web-slinger (“I won’t make another one for the sake of making another one.“), these could be the most prominent Spidey stories for some time.
So, here’s what seems to be coming.
Marvel’s Venom: Lethal Protector (2025)
Just as Insomniac followed up Marvel’s Spider-Man with the interstitial Miles Morales, it appears Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 will get a sidequel in the form of Venom: Lethal Protector in 2025. This is billed as an “all-new storyline that continues Spider-Man 2 and leads into Spider-Man 3.”
Naturally, the game will allow you to play as Venom, but will also feature the “Spider-Heroes” as playable characters. It appears that Carnage will be the villain and you will battle to retake boroughs infected by him. In line with Miles Morales this will be an 8-10 hour-long game, so we’re hoping it’s released at a suitable price point.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 Parts 1 & 2 (2027 & 2028)
Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 will (no doubt controversially) be split into two separate games. In a measure of how brutal this hack is, the information comes from a slide breaking down the hard financial projections, revealing that they’d expect to make $700-720 million from releasing it as one instalment, but $1.1 billion as two games.
Marvel’s Spider-Man: The Great Web (2027)
Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 will also launch with a multiplayer mode known as “The Great Web,” which strongly indicates that the games are going to tell a Spider-Verse story. Without spoilers, this was very roughly hinted at in the last moments of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (as well as in some multiversally-themed in-game collectables). If this proves true we’d expect Insomniac to shake up the formula with multiple Spider-Man variants to play as, together with drastically different environments to explore in co-op.
We wish Insomniac hadn’t suffered this hack and this information being made public will be a crushing blow to company morale. But, if there is a silver lining, it’s that the future of Spider-Man on PlayStation is looking bright.
Who knows, this may even be a direct crossover with Sony’s Spider-Verse movies and a way to provide some loose connective tissue that directly connects the MCU to the Spider-Verse and the Insomniac games. There may yet be more information to come from this leak, so watch this space.
Published: Dec 19, 2023 06:50 am