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Insomniac leaks reveal an X-Men game and future Marvel roadmap

After Wolverine, the developer plans a team game

Wolverine, Cyclops, Psylocke, Gambit, Beast, Rogue, Storm and Colossus charge toward Magneto in artwork by Alex Ross interpreting Jim Lee’s 1991 X-Men #1 cover Image: Alex Ross/Marvel
Michael McWhertor is a journalist with more than 17 years of experience covering video games, technology, movies, TV, and entertainment.

Marvel and Insomniac Games will continue their relationship for at least the next decade, with the Spider-Man developer tackling the X-Men for a new video game slated for 2030, according to leaked internal documents. The leak was part of a ransomware attack on the Sony-owned studio.

Insomniac had already teased a stand-alone Wolverine game, which is supposedly slated for a 2026 release, but it appears to have grander plans for Marvel’s mutants. According to a leaked internal roadmap, which is said to be dated from July of this year, the studio’s future lineup of licensed superhero games includes Marvel’s Venom (2025), Marvel’s Wolverine (2026), Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 (2028), and Marvel’s X-Men (2030).

Those release plans and dates could shift, of course, especially in light of the devastating data breach on the studio. But those games, especially Marvel’s X-Men, would conceivably be released within the window of the next-generation PlayStation (i.e., PlayStation 6). It would also reasonably line up with Marvel Studios’ plans to finally bring the X-Men to the big screen, sometime after the release of Avengers: Secret Wars, which Disney currently has slated for 2027.

According to other details leaked as part of the hack, Insomniac is allocating a majority of its staff to Venom and Wolverine, and won’t start working in earnest on X-Men until mid-2025. What appears to be a separate, now-outdated roadmap for Insomniac Games showed multiple X-Men games coming through 2033.

Insomniac appears to have secured a semi-exclusive arrangement with Marvel to use the X-Men in its games, according to an internal document detailing the X-Men license terms. That document, which may also be outdated, states that Marvel cannot release or announce any X-Men games on console, PC, or streaming platforms, or use an X-Men character as a competitive in a game through the end of 2035.

There is a carve-out that X-Men characters can appear in “multi-family Marvel games (e.g., Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy),” and that Marvel “retains rights to children’s games and certain X-Men games from the 1990s,” but the X-Men license appears to have been effectively locked down by Insomniac.

Beyond the four games it’s making with Marvel, Insomniac’s release roadmap includes two other titles planned for release by 2032: a new Ratchet & Clank game and a new, unannounced IP.

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