During Gamescom’s Opening Night Live event on Monday the 19th, Playstation announced on social media that they have acquired the company that has helped create a lot of iconic Playstation characters, Insomniac Games.
Full details of the acquisition haven’t been released, but Playstation stated: “We are honored and thrilled to join forces with this legendary developer.”
For years, Insomniac has stated that they love being independent. However, it seems this is a definite answer from Sony to Microsoft’s strategy of being aggressive in their pursuit of adding more developers to their first-party studios. Microsoft has added six developers over the past year.
Insomniac always seemed a likely choice for them to be in the Sony first-party lineup, with the creation of series Ratchet & Clank, Spyro the Dragon, and Resistance all being exclusive to the Playstation family of consoles.
The newest addition to this great lineup of exclusives they’ve made is Marvel’s Spider-Man, which isn’t a created IP, but still, the best Spider-Man game ever made.
This is a blow to the Oculus Rift platform because Insomniac Games has worked on two exclusives to the VR platform; The Unspoken and Edge of Nowhere. Now, Insomniac Games’ VR focus will be moved to the PSVR platform to have more quality games to Playstation’s VR system.
Insomniac Games have made 24 games that have come to consoles or PC. Only five of these games have been either on multiple consoles or exclusive to another console. The other 19 have all been exclusive to Playstation.
So, it is a no-brainer decision for Sony to acquire Insomniac Games in this hodgepodge of developers being acquired. They have a great relationship already with the amount of work they have done together over the past two decades.
In the wake of this acquisition, they have more stability to work on smaller projects or VR titles which they have experimented with the past few years.
The obvious focus for them though is to work on the sequel to Spider-Man and possibly more Ratchet & Clank. However, they still have two teams, one in Burbank, California and Durham, North Carolina.
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