Insomniac Games, the Spider-Man and Ratchet and Clank studio, cost Sony almost a quarter of a billion dollars.
Insomniac Games was founded by Ted Price in February 1994. Originally known as Xtreme Software, the company had to change its name due to a clash with another studio. (We can’t quite believe that two separate companies wanted to be called “Xtreme” but Insomniac was available. It was a different time.)
From its early days, Insomniac was a PlayStation house. With Disruptor and the Spyro series on the original PlayStation, then Ratchet and Clank on PS2, before dual-wielding Ratchet and the Resistance series on the PS3, Insomniac and Sony have gone hand in hand since the early days.
Then everything changed when Microsoft Game Studios attacked. Insomniac developed and released Sunset Overdrive for Microsoft on Xbox One in 2014 and, later, Windows PC.
From there, Insomniac developed multi-platform and VR games for a few years, before coming home to Sony in 2018 with Marvel’s Spider-Man on PS4. The game was a widespread critical and commercial success, and Sony clearly agreed: it bought Insomniac Games six months ago.
Insomniac Games became a part of PlayStation Worldwide Studios. Presumably, that means we’ll be seeing a sequel to Marvel’s Spider-Man. Who knows? Maybe we’ll also see Ratchet and Clank back again on PlayStation 5. You never know – Sony might even be able to wrangle a PlayStation release of Sunset Overdrive, now that it owns Insomniac.
Now, thanks to an earnings report from Sony, we know how much it paid for Insomniac Games: $229 million US (around 25 billion yen, £177 million GBP, or €210 million).
With that price tag, and with Mark Cerny’s insistence on using Insomniac’s web-slinger to highlight the lack of load times on the PlayStation 5, we wouldn’t be surprised to see a cross-generational remaster of Marvel’s Spider-Man on PS5 to help Sony get its money’s worth from that purchase price.
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