Kotaku editors have studied some of the documents that got online after the hacker attack on Insomniac Games. She discovered that the studio was trying to optimize costs and was preparing for layoffs.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
The main thing from Kotaku material:
- in the future, Insomniac Games intends to spend no more than $350 million on creating AAA games (note, however, in another leaked document it is reported that the studio estimated the budget of Marvel's Spider-Man 3 at $ 385 million);
- Insomniac Games notes that the development of the second part of Marvel's Spider-Man cost three times more than the development of the first game. But she is not sure that such an increase in costs is obvious to ordinary gamers.;
- The studio plans to reduce the cost of creating cinematics and cutscenes. She is also going to pause the development of the game when problems are detected in order to eliminate them at an early stage;
- developers sometimes want to do intermediate projects in the spirit of Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. With a budget of $90 million, the game sold 10 million copies, which made it extremely profitable. In addition, it took less time to create it than it did to create a large-scale Marvel's Spider-Man. The next such game may be a project about Venom, — the studio expects a good profit from it;
- Sony is going to cut the budget of Insomniac Games and lay off some employees. In November, she announced plans to lay off 50-75 out of 500 people. It is not known for sure whether the cuts have already been made;
- The head of Insomniac Games, Ted Price, believes that cuts can be made in the teams that are working on the next Ratchet & Clank and the game on the new IP. However, many industry veterans work in these teams and their dismissal can create unnecessary risks. Therefore, perhaps the studio will fire the least productive developers of Marvel's Wolverine and Marvel's Spider-Man 3;
- Sony plans to make cuts at its other studios as well. Perhaps one of them will be closed.