Includes employee information, details on slew of unannounced Marvel games.
Image credit: Insomniac Games
Detailed plans revealing the future projects of PlayStation-owned Spider-Man developer Insomniac have been published online, stolen from the company by hackers.
The files include a project roadmap for the next decade and beyond including an array of unannounced projects, plus production details, art assets and personal information on Insomniac employees.
Insomniac suffered a data breach last week, with ransomware group Ryhsida demanding 50 bitcoins – the equivalent of $2m – within a week to avoid the data being published publicly. Now, seven days later, the group has gone through with its threat.
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As first reported by CyberDaily, the leaked trove of data includes 1.3m files, and over 1.6TB of data. This includes private messages from the company’s Slack and employee details including files related the company’s hiring and firing.
A Ryhsida spokesperson told CyberDaily the hack specifically targeted Insomniac to demand money, as a high-profile game developer would likely be an “easy target”.
Sony is yet to respond to the leak, though last week acknowledged “reports that Insomniac Games has been the victim of a cyber security attack”.
“We are currently investigating this situation,” Sony said at the time in a statement to Eurogamer. “We have no reason to believe that any other SIE or Sony divisions have been impacted.”
Files from the leak are now spreading across the internet, and are being pored over on reddit and social media.
A product schedule for the company until 2035 lists upcoming game launches including unannounced multiplayer projects, a new Ratchet and Clank game, further Spider-Man games and spin-offs, plans for other X-Men games after Wolverine, and dates to launch new IP.
The level of detail in the leak is eye-opening and near-unprecedented, with game budgets, sales forecasts and revenue-sharing plans for the studio’s lucrative Marvel licensing deal laid bare.
Files show Insomniac sketching out the possibility of splitting Spider-Man 3’s single-player story into two parts to release over consecutive years, with detailed costs and predicted sales.
Looking somewhat closer ahead, character and story details of Insomniac’s Wolverine are also included, with details of the game’s plot and ending visible years before its release. Character art, test animations and even an early sequence of gameplay are included.
In another set of slides, an internal Sony document on the games industry discussess Microsoft’s now-completed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and describes it as a “leapfrog” moment where Xbox could overtake PlayStation’s own strategy via use of Game Pass, Call of Duty, and a foothold on mobile. Sony must “expand”, the document states, with “premium sales model is the central approach”.
Eurogamer has contacted PlayStation for further comment today.
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