Sony has established close cooperation with Marvel, under which Spider-Man on PlayStation 4 has already been created, and in the future PlayStation 5 owners will play Spider-Man 2 and Wolverine. It turns out that Microsoft may have been given the chance to create superhero games as well, but it turned down the offer.
Spider-Man on PS4 turned out to be a huge hit. The game has been appreciated by journalists and players, and Sony has confirmed the sale of over 20 million copies of Peter Parker’s adventure. As it turns out – the title could never be created or the Xbox would get its adventures with superheroes, but Microsoft preferred to focus on its own IP.
Steven L Kent in 2021 published the book “The Ultimate History of Video Games Vol. 2”, in which Jay Ong (Executive Vice President and CEO of Marvel Games) presented the story of breaking cooperation with Activision – the company was not satisfied with the quality of Spider-Man developed by Vicarious Visions, so it wanted to look for another partner.
Jay Ong went to the representatives of Xbox and PlayStation with a simple question – “We don’t have any big console deals with anyone right now, what would you like to do?”. As it turned out, Microsoft’s teams were to develop their own productions, but the situation at Sony was different.
“In August 2014, I sat down with two PlayStation third-party directors, Adam Boyes and John Drake, in a conference room in Burbank.”
At the meeting, Ong said the eloquent words: “We have a dream that we could beat Arkham and have at least one game and maybe even multiple productions to propel the adoption of your platform.”
In this situation, Sony offered Marvel to create Spider-Man and hired Insomniac Games for this job – The team at the time was still independent, but was considered “one of Sony’s most important partners”.
Sony has meanwhile bought Insomniac Games, and now the developers are developing some big games for PlayStation, and at least two are related to Marvel’s IP.
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