While Insomniac has recently been making bank on their Marvel’s Spider-Man games, the studio has had some recent struggles with some non-Marvel games.
Because of a ransomware attack that Sony did not pay to ransom, 1.2 million files from Insomniac was leaked to the public. This included details about Insomniac, parent company Sony, and also personal details of people from Insomniac and Sony.
We will discuss the leaked information below. We can’t ignore this news, but we will point out the way the information was obtained was particularly unethical. You may want to consider this yourself before you go forward with reading this news. But, like Pandora’s Box, it isn’t possible for us to just close the box and pretend nobody found out what they did.
We had previously reported on the costs of making those Marvel’s Spider-Man games. In fact, the sales figures of all of Insomniac’s titles came up from this leak. While there’s historical value to these numbers, we will focus on some recent releases.
As reported by Insider Gaming, Sunset Overdrive was a particularly dire situation for Insomniac. While it earned respectable MetaCritic scores of 81 on Xbox One and 83 on PC, the online buzz was not as glowing. There was discourse over its self-referential tone and multiplayer, but whatever the reason, it failed to attract an audience.
The title was made for $42,682,135, and sold 1,898,433 units. The game made $49,737,133, meaning it only made about $ 8 million in profit. In fact, after splitting revenue with co-developers IG and Blind Squirrel Games, it comes up on Insomniac’s ledger making $ 567.
As shared by Faizan Shaikh, another document from the leak indicates that Microsoft has exclusive rights to publish 2 Sunset Overdrive sequels. While it isn’t impossible, future Sunset Overdrive sequels would require Microsoft to work with Insomniac, as the IP owner, and Insomniac’s owner, Sony.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart looks like it was a bigger success story, as it had better buzz with critics and online. However, as reported by GameRant, the situation is worse than it looks. This title had an $ 81 million budget, and sold 2.2 million units. That number suggests it made only $ 73 million in revenue, but thankfully for Ratchet and pals, that isn’t the end of the story.
That document was dated to 2020, and was presumably a prediction of the game’s potential sales numbers. In another leaked document, as shared on ResetEra, the title had sold 2.72 million units, and has net sales of $ 145 million.
We do know that Sony was not satisfied with this sales number, as was the case with their other first party titles. Nixxes made a Windows port of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, released on May 20, 2023. We don’t have the numbers for how this port sold, but it was at least safely profitable, if not a huge hit, before this port.
While some would point to the weaknesses of each game’s respective platforms when they were released, this may indicate problems with Insomniac itself. Maybe it is best that they are now tied to the Marvel license, as this seems to be their clearest pathway to success.
One unfortunate postscript to this is that it seems the dearth of new Ratchet & Clank games is well-deserved. Video games with $ 80 million budgets cannot afford to be mildly profitable in 2023, not if it is to sustain the livelihoods of a 500+ employee studio like Insomniac. Or perhaps Insomniac should be content with making smaller Ratchet & Clank games in the future.
