Insomniac After Wolverine: Three Studio Heads, a Bigger Burbank and Marvel's Next Move
The Spider-Man studio has shipped its toughest-reviewed game in a decade, and sold a lot of it anyway. Here is where Insomniac stands, who runs it now, and what is actually confirmed about its future.
In February 1994, a young developer named Ted Price incorporated a tiny company called Xtreme Software in California. A year later it had a new name, Insomniac Games, and before long a purple dragon called Spyro. Thirty-two years on, the studio has made some of PlayStation's biggest hits, and it has just finished the most difficult launch in its recent history, without its founder at the helm.
Marvel's Wolverine launched on PS5 on September 15, 2026. It scored 77 on Metacritic, the lowest for a full Insomniac release in more than ten years, but analytics firm Alinea estimated it sold about 1.9 million copies in its first three days, generating around $130 million. Sony has not published its own figures. The game is covered in depth in our Wolverine review round-up; this story is about the studio behind it.
New faces at the top
For three decades, Insomniac was Ted Price's company. In January 2025, he announced he would retire as CEO by the end of March 2025. He was replaced not by one leader but by three co-studio heads: Ryan Schneider, Jen Huang and Chad Dezern, all long-time Insomniac veterans.
The studio has around 450 employees, and in April 2026 it renewed and expanded its Burbank office to 65,000 square feet, a sign that Sony expects it to keep growing rather than shrink.
From Spyro to Spider-Man
Insomniac's history is a list of franchises: Spyro (three games, 1998 to 2000), Ratchet & Clank (from 2002 to 2021's Rift Apart), and Resistance, a trilogy of PS3 shooters. Then, in 2018, came Marvel's Spider-Man, which sold 9 million copies by November that year and 13.2 million by August 2019.
That success changed the studio's life. Sony announced it would buy Insomniac in August 2019, for about $229 million, and the deal closed on November 15, 2019. Since then, the studio has released Spider-Man: Miles Morales (2020), Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (2021, 88 on OpenCritic), Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (2023, 88) and now Wolverine.
The year of the leak
Insomniac's road to Wolverine included one of the most damaging security incidents in games. In December 2023, the ransomware group Rhysida demanded $2 million in bitcoin. Insomniac refused, and about 1.67 terabytes of data were published, including an early build of Wolverine and internal planning documents.
Those documents included reported plans for future Marvel games. We are not repeating them as fact: leaked plans from 2023 are not announcements, and studios change course constantly. What we can say is that Insomniac has not officially announced its next game.
What Marvel says
The clearest public signal comes from Marvel itself. In November 2025, before Wolverine launched, Haluk Mentes, general manager of Marvel Games, told Game Informer that the two companies have been working together for "more than a decade" and that Marvel is "so proud to continue collaborating for many years to come".
That is about as strong a hint as a publisher can give without naming a game. Wolverine was Insomniac's fourth Marvel game, after Spider-Man, Miles Morales and Spider-Man 2.
What's next
Insomniac's immediate job is supporting Wolverine: the studio has said it is gathering player feedback to refine the game after launch. After that, all signs point to more Marvel work, under a new leadership team that now owns both the studio's successes and this year's mixed reception.
For now, the best Insomniac games to play are still Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, both available on PS5 and PC. They are a reminder of why so many players are willing to forgive one rough landing.