Let’s talk about the Insomniac Leak (in very, very limited terms)…

Whelp, it’s happened. If you haven’t been following the news too closely (and who can blame you, videogame news usually slows to a crawl at this time of year), Insomniac games were the victim of a pretty massive hack that included who knows how much internal data on both upcoming projects and employees, the hackers last I heard had demanded a ransom, apparently they either weren’t paid, weren’t paid enough or just said screw it we’re dumping all the info anyways, so now a ton of stuff is just out there in the interwebs including footage of Wolverine, Insomniac’s game release schedule for pretty much the next decade, and unfortunately apparently a ton of employee personal info.

I want to be very clear: This is shitty and it sucks for the employees, especially in regards to the personal information. I feel that specifically should have a hefty criminal punishment for the hacker(s). I’m a little more nonchalant about the game footage and release schedule. It sucks that these hackers decided the best use of their skills was to spoil the plans of some game developer and not, I dunno, wipe out student loans or something actually rebellious and cool. I’m obviously not going to be talking about any personal employee data. I’m not going to be posting any leaked footage or directly linking to any sources. Frankly if you want to know, it’s out there and not hard to find. In regards to the leak, I am only going to discuss Insomniac’s release slate as there are plenty of Marvel and therefore Disney-related projects on there. It’s out there, people are going to talk about it, so I might as well throw my two cents in on that small part of this massive leak. So let’s talk about that.

Firstly, Wolverine. We knew this was Insomniac's next big game, that’s not a surprise in the least. The surprising part is that it looks like it might not be out until late 2026. That’s a hell of a wait for sure, but when you think about it, Insomniac made a pretty big deal about the fact that Spider-Man 2 required little to no crunch, an all too rare feat in game development, so if they took a look at Wolverine and said hey, if we want to confidently deliver this and not have it be a hot mess and not kill ourselves doing so, it needs to be late 2026, so be it.

In the meantime, not officially announced but probably the least surprising news is that it looks like we are getting a spin-off starring Venom, before Wolverine comes out. This will likely be a smaller, leaner game much like Spider-Man: Miles Morales before it. The question is, can Insomniac make a compelling Venom game, even a less ambitious one? Because honestly the Venom/Anti-Venom stuff in Spider-Man 2 is fun for a little while, but I can see it getting dull quickly unless Venom’s abilities are fleshed out a lot more. Protagonists in Insomniac games usually have a variety of gadgets and gizmos to add variety to combat. Venom doesn’t do gadgets and gizmos. Not saying it can’t be done, Insomniac is super-talented, but it will be interesting to see how they tackle this particular challenge to make an interesting game starring The Lethal Protector. Spider-Man 3 is also on the slate but that’s such a known quantity I feel like it’s not worth discussing at length til we know more about it.

And finally, the big surprise. Apparently, Insomniac is working on an X-Men game. Late 2030 is not only far off, it’s far off enough to literally be a PlayStation 6 game, so it’s kind of pointless to speculate what this will be. The thing about X-Men is that it’s very much an ensemble cast. Sure, some characters get more focus than others, but at minimum, I would think an X-Men game would have four protagonists, possibly even six or more. It’s a team, and usually a rather large one at that.

Insomniac’s titles are pretty focused on at most a couple of protagonists, and usually, when they have tackled multiple protagonists, they share a similar powerset, gadgets, etc with pretty minor differences. X-Men generally have vastly different powers from one another. Not saying Insomniac can’t pull this off, but an X-Men game might easily be their most ambitious project to date if it’s to do justice to the legendary superhero team. Could it be multi-player? It’s possible but given Insomniac has historically been a very story-driven developer, I think that’s extremely unlikely.

That’s all for today. In other Disney-games stuff I have been playing plenty of Disney Dreamlight Valley’s new expansion, A Rift in Time and should have some thoughts on that tomorrow. Remember, leaks like this are generally bad and done by shitty people when it comes to things like video games and especially employees' private personal info that only benefits crooks. See ya real soon!