Insomniac seems to be subject to some poaching from a surprising competitor.
As reported by PlayStationLifeStyle, Mary Kenney, who is story lead for Marvel’s Wolverine, just announced that she is leaving the project, and the studio Insomniac, to take a new job over at CD Projekt RED.
Kenney made this post over at her LinkedIn:
“Today was my first day as a senior writer at CD Projekt RED. I can’t wait to talk more about my project, I’m thrilled to be getting back into RPGs.”
Kenney’s departure follows Aaron Habibipour also leaving Insomniac Games for CD Projekt RED. Habibipour was art director for Marvel’s Wolverine.
This PlayStationLifeStyle report speculates that these departures do not indicate problems at Insomniac or for the Marvel’s Wolverine project, but truthfully, we don’t really know enough to be certain of that, one way or the other.
Insomniac was forced to confirm that Marvel’s Wolverine exists after they were subject to a ransomware hack last year. Insomniac’s data was so compromised that some gamers even managed to download a playable build of Marvel’s Wolverine.
Ironically, those unscrupulous gamers did not realize that that build would be sending telemetry data back to Insomniac, so the studio could identify who was messing with their work, and they could be punished accordingly.
But perhaps, the story here is not the game, but about Insomniac itself. In spite of being the most active developer for original first party exclusives for the PlayStation 5, Sony went ahead and laid off a substantial number of Insomniac employees. That certainly reflected on Sony’s financial issues, and how they valued their own developers.
The ransomware hack revealed that Insomniac was planning layoffs, something that we were sure even their own rank and file employees did not know was happening. Based on the data that was collected, it seemed that Insomniac titles like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 went far over budget, especially in comparison to how much money the games actually made.
So that seemed to be the rationale for layoffs at what has been Sony’s most successful studio in this console generation. And it’s possible that Sony is still looking to reduce staff at Insomniac, but having their employees find new job opportunities and leave of their own volition may allow them to save face.
This interpretation may be incorrect, of course, and it may be that CD Projekt RED is just flat out poaching Insomniac’s employees. Either way, it won’t be surprising if even more Insomniac employees leave for CD Projekt RED or other studios in the near future.
