Insomniac, the developer of "Marvel's Spider-Man 2", was hacked and leaked 1.67TB of data (more than 1.3 million files), including various videos ("Marvel's Wolverine"), pictures, and Insomniac's game plans for release in early 2030. There are still various aftermaths of this incident. Recently, foreign media discovered from leaked documents that Sony forced first-party studios to significantly reduce expenditures against the backdrop of soaring game costs.
According to Kotaku, leaked documents containing meeting notes stated that a PlayStation studio would be shut down, but it's unclear whether this statement is still valid.
The documents also show that Insomniac is facing pressure to cut budgets, with 50-75 employees already marked for layoffs.
According to reports, Insomniac discussed how to "strategically lay off 50-75 people" in accordance with Sony's requirements. The best solution should be to deeply lay off the "Marvel Wolverine" and "Marvel Spider-Man 3" teams and replace them with other team members. The team developed the unannounced "Ratchet and Clank" new work and an unannounced new IP.
According to leaked documents, Sony has also asked its entire first-party studios to lay off employees. Previously, "Dreamland" developer MediaMolecule, "Destiny" developer Bungie and Naughty Dog have all laid off employees, with Bungie laying off the most.
In addition, the documents also revealed Sony's concerns about the increasing cost of Insomniac game development. The development cost of "Marvel's Spider-Man 2" was US$315 million, far exceeding the original plan of US$270 million. In the end, the game needed to sell 7.2 million units to recover the cost. "Marvel's Spider-Man 2" sold more than 5 million copies within 11 days of release.
Leaked documents reveal the risks of increasingly unstable AAA video game production, with some experts calling the model "unsustainable." And Insomniac isn't the only developer spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a single game. In June of this year, documents released in the Xbox FTC lawsuit showed that the development costs of "The Last of Us 2" and "Horizon West" each exceeded $200 million.
According to the documents, The Last of Us 2 cost $220 million to develop and had 200 full-time employees at its peak. GuerrillaGames' "Horizon West" cost $212 million to develop and used more than 300 developers. According to Kotaku, Insomniac emphasized in a slide the need to keep budgets for future AAA games at $350 million or less.
With such high costs associated with producing large-scale video games, anything less than equally massive sales could be disastrous. Sony announced that "Marvel's Spider-Man 2" had the fastest 24-hour sales among SIE first-party games, with more than 2.5 million units sold in one day, but it is now clear that this type of game requires tens of millions of sales to achieve a significant return on investment.