Here's another very delayed post.

Two months ago, the biggest leak in the video game industry burst onto the web with Insomniac's plans for the next decade. And this is how I saw some press and prominent voices in the industry react to said news.

I'm not here to get into the nitty gritty of the information itself, but my goodness, we can't pretend the leak and the information inside doesn't exist. Of course I was clicking around, reading, and watching.1 This is an unprecedented inside look at how video games at Insomniac's scale are made. The cost—financially, creativity, and over time—that goes into building up a catalog like Insomniac has over the course of its existence.

The development information on Marvel's Wolverine alone is profound. It's an unrestricted, genuine look at bringing a game to life. How are they planned, built, prototyped, etc. It is soup to nuts2 game dev. It's fascinating, even if it was shared in a way that was never intended for public consumption.

On the business side, I don't see a world where competitors weren't diving right in alongside the rest of us. How could Bethesda, EA, and Skydance not go poke around and compare Sony's deal with Marvel to their own. Same goes for potential studios looking to make a deal with Marvel. Sure, that is conjecture on my part, but it feels likely. And from an academic perspective, I think it shows how expensive and unsustainable this type of development is. Sort of like what Shawn Layden was talking about when he left Sony in 2021:

Game development “seems to double in cost every platform,” Layden said, noting that his budgets for recent big PlayStation 4 titles each hit $100 million. “If we can’t stop the cost curve from going up, all we can do is try to de-risk it. That puts you in a place where you’re incentivized toward sequels.” He predicted that PS5 games will cost $200 million to make and that prices will continue to grow exponentially from there.

The result of these higher budgets is an endless cavalcade of stale annual releases in ubiquitous series like Call of Duty and Madden. At the same time, every publisher is chasing the latest billion-dollar trends, from Candy Crush to Fortnite to Roblox. “What happens there is you end up with 3-4 silos of games or game types that continue to exist, and variety is squeezed out,” Layden said. His former company reflects that strategy as well, with a focus on blockbusters above all else.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 cost $300 million to make.3

Then there are the unfortunate leaks of personnel information. This holds no educational or insightful value. It just hurts those affected. The story to follow, from a journalistic perspective, is how Sony and Insomniac are going to protect their affected staff and new practices that will be implemented to prevent this in the future.

These angles from the leak need to be discussed and reported. It is news. I know I am two months late writing this post myself, but I feel that is moot to the larger state of feigning ignorance. You can both report the news and empathize with friends, coworkers, and developers. But ignoring the news is a disservice to consumers, the staff at Insomniac, and Sony itself. Sony hasn't had a hack of this caliber since the great PSN outage. How did this happen? What will be done to stop this from happening again? These questions cannot be answered by ignoring the news and sweeping it under the rug. Don't bury your heads in the sand.

Footnotes

  1. I definitely did read the entirety of the plot of Marvel's Wolverine. ↩

  2. Considering the game is not done, maybe more soup to main course? ↩

  3. The Last of Us Part II cost $220 million. God of War: Ragnarök cost $200~ million. Horizon Forbidden West cost $212 million. All sequels. ^53b8d8 ↩