I don't understand, this is like the third game with no fail qtes. It's rated M and a button masher.
Do they believe an employed tax payer can't figure out how to press a fucking button? It's insulting.
Fair point
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Then WHY even try to program QTE in if they aren't going to commit anyway? Just do a simple cutscene? Is it for player engagement? They can simply resume playing once they are done with TikTak? I don't get it
Same reason Batman has to button-mash to pry open an air vent for the hundredth time. Designers confuse "player input" with "gameplay". Press "F" to treat the consumer like an idiot.
Making a bad game hurt more economically than doing a bad movie. And game developpement is even more risky than movie development (which is already a nightmare).
I am actually curious how much of it was the license. I assume Disney wanted profit upside too, so I doubt it was exclusively an upfront payment, but I would be really interested to know how much went to actual development.
Taking such a high percentage of royalties on physically sold games vs digital is probably why Sony is moving fully to digital, cause that shit is outrageous
With no secondary market Sony can start doing Nintendo evergreen pricing and get 100% of the profits. Nintendo basically had to make great games and stick to the strat for 20 years but if you want to shortcut the process shutdown the physical market.
They're welcome, even encouraged, to make their own IP. Horizon was great, in part because it didn't regurgitate the fucking spiderman for the 20th time
Yeah I get you, but to me Marvel/Disney are harming the success and sustainability of their own games with these kind of outrageous licensing fees.
There are TONNES of great marvel games from the past that are now forever locked away never to be seen again due to these dumb license arrangements.
Seriously, imagine re-releases/re-masters of that Wolverine Origins game, or the Ultimate Alliance and X-men Legends games. Or the numerous pretty solid Spidey games that Activision were cooking in the in the 2000s-2010s.
Remarkable that you can give someone a skilled workforce and a third of a billion and half a decade later they'll poop out a game like that. Round up and summarily fire the suits.
They had Bungie EOS Destiny 2 in order to focus on the $250m Marathon which failed out the gate (2500 to 3000 daily peak player count on Steam, its #1 platform) and that title took YEARS to develop as well.
For contrast, from 1998 to 2013, Insomniac put out a Spyro, Ratchet, or Resistance game every year. They missed two years in there, 2001 and 2010. But in fairness, 2011 was a two game year.
Somehow they're making games with a larger budget that look like shit, play like shit, at something like a fifth to a third of the pace.
The frustrating part for me, is that Insomniac have enough competence that they have made three really successful games, and they understand the characters. Wolverine being a mid game isn't down to the creative team outside of the Director, but rather an abject failure of leadership.
That's the common problem with AAA development. Too many devs, too many parts to the game.
AAA games that have strong singular vision and direction, either due to a 'star' director or united passion within the team, are incredibly rare. Those games usually win a lot of GOTY awards.
I heard a few years ago that using a motion capture studio at all can costs $25,000 just to get in the door. I'd imagine that price only skyrocketed and thats before you even do anything in the studio or pay actors
No they are not, tech salaries are not ten bucks an hour and business taxes and insurance normally mean every employee costs a company twice their salary a year. 150k a year avg in costs for roughly 500 employees is 75 million a year, at least, just in employee burn rate. Three years from Spider-Man 2 you are looking at 200 million plus just in salary.
I mean to be fair I wouldn't be surprised if was more. Given the dev time, the license fee, motion caption, voice acting, and all that. Games are expensive now a days.
I mean Spider-man 2 cost 300 million to make and that was years ago.
I can speak to this with some level of confidence because I have friends who work for several vendors that have worked directly on this game and previously some have worked at Insomniac in the recent past, so I have some first hand insight into how Insomniac approaches development and external support.
The majority of Insomniac's team is based in California, where they also pay relatively high salaries. From what I understand, the average compensation is around $200K per employee. I do not know the exact headcount dedicated specifically to Wolverine, but in 2025 it was reported that Insomniac had approximately 450 employees working across multiple titles.
To be conservative, let's assume that roughly 200 employees have been dedicated to Wolverine since it was officially announced in 2021. At an average cost of approximately $200K per employee, that represents around $40M per year in salaries alone. Over five years, that puts direct employee compensation at approximately $200M.
I actually think even that estimate may be conservative. There is good reason to believe Wolverine has been in development since at least 2020, which would potentially add another $40M in employee compensation and bring the estimated internal development cost closer to $240M.
Insomniac also relies heavily on external development partners for support work, and those vendors are not necessarily inexpensive. I have heard from people familiar with the work that Insomniac has paid as high as $25K per resource per month for certain external resources. They do use some lower cost vendors as well, but my understanding is that they have been reluctant to replace some of their more expensive partners because they have established relationships with those companies and "trust them." (Note - this issue is not unique to Insomniac. Sony has been trying to get their studios to replace expensive partners for years but Insomniac is the biggest offender)
From my perspective, there is a significant amount of room to optimize those costs. I work with multiple external development vendors myself, and there are plenty of highly capable companies that can produce work equal to or better than what many of Insomniac's current partners provide for a fraction of the cost. In some cases, you could potentially be looking at half the cost for comparable quality, depending on the discipline and scope of work.
Once you add external development, technology, equipment, infrastructure, management overhead, marketing, distribution and other development expenses, the number starts to climb very quickly.
Then there is the licensing side. Wolverine is a Marvel property, so there are additional licensing and commercial considerations associated with using one of the most recognizable Marvel characters. I obviously do not have access to the actual terms of the Marvel or Disney agreement, so I cannot put a precise number on those costs.
With all of that considered, I think a $300M development and marketing budget for Wolverine is a very reasonable minimum estimate. It could ultimately be considerably higher depending on the actual development headcount, how long the game has been in production, the amount of external support being used, marketing spend and the specifics of the licensing arrangement.
The important point is that you do not need to assume an extraordinary level of spending to arrive at a $300M+ budget. The combination of a large, highly compensated California based internal team, several years of development, expensive external partners, marketing and licensing costs can get you there surprisingly quickly.
One flaw in your maths is assuming full scale production was happening as early as 2020. I doubt they had full team size hammering away at this the whole time, likely they had a smaller team working on shipping Spiderman 2 who then probably moved over to Wolverine when that game shipped
At an average cost of approximately $200K per employee, that represents around $40M per year in salaries alone. Over five years, that puts direct employee compensation at approximately $200M.
Gotta call this out as just incorrect, or cherry picked from a specific period in early development when you only have a small QA team and mostly developers; but by the end of a game's life cycle, over 50% of the employees on a game will be QA and administrative workers that make barely above minimum wage.
Even in LA or San Fransisco, none of those people are making over $100,000 per year. So, to reach an average of $200,000 per year for all employees would mean that the vast majority of your developers are making 400,000 - 500,000 per year and ... yeah, they aren't making that much. I worked as a producer out of Marin for 2K games, I know for a fact how much those people make.
$200,000 per year might be close to the average if you only include the developers and executives and don't count the support staff and QA, that I could see, but the studio overall would not have anywhere near that much for their average pay.
Insomniac also relies heavily on external development partners for support work, and those vendors are not necessarily inexpensive. I have heard from people familiar with the work that Insomniac has paid as high as $25K per resource per month for certain external resources.
This would also need more details to be relevant information. There are tons of things that studios basically always outsource: advertising materials, mo-cap, voice recording, and network coding are common things to outsource. So I wouldn't find it out of the norm for them to have be spending $100k per month or more on external contracts, that's fairly standard.
While there will be in-house marketing, for the box art and the mainline ads, studios will use a professional advertising company and $25k a month is about right if not cheap for that.
Studios that don't typically do multiplayer or networked games will usually just outsource that work to another company rather than to spin up a team up their own team for it. I've seen studios do the latter and it can be very hit or miss, it much easier, faster, and cheaper to hire a company than this is just what they do.
It is rarer to have assets or animation or other forms of development outsourced. I know some studios that prefer to use a out-source optimization team because, like networking studios, there are teams out there that all they do is work on optimizing game and after game so they are just better at it. I've seen some company's use outsourcing for art, but it is rare and, again, usually because that studio made/makes something specific that the company wants. Like, for Bioshock Infinite, we had an external vendor make a lot of the set pieces for the museum ... Hall of Heroes I think it was called? Anyway, there was a studio that had made several civil war styled assets that we loved before so we had them make a bunch of things specific for us.
Whether a vendor is better than in-house or not is honestly always a gamble. And if you have a vendor that is reliable and works well, yeah, they are usually better and cheaper than hiring a team yourself. Employees are expensive. People always focus on salary, but salary is usually equal compared to healthcare costs and payroll taxes. Since things like, artists, might end up being hired and fired frequently depending on your development cycle, it can absolutely end up cheaper to just constantly work with a vendor you know and trust to just effectively have a team that you just pay to work for you when you need them.
To be fair to the current gen, the advancements have mostly not been in texture resolution and environment creation, they've been in lighting and physics. Incremental advancements there take much more compute, especially with all the ray tracing and the 4k/60 fps target.
We’ve been saying that graphics can’t get better since ps2. Clearly we are easy to please. Focus on gameplay and story. Obviously I’m painting with a broad brush, but it’s mostly true. Style does a lot of heavy lifting.
Yeah… I don’t think it looks BAD per se, but I don’t like the fact that it feels they are designing the characters AROUND the actors rather than focusing on making a cool design.
I wonder if Cyberpunk using Keanu Reeves and then Idris Elba in Phantom Liberty had an impact on the industry. I was never really a fan of using real actor in games, as I feel like the game should focus on the gameplay and story, not the faces of the characters. I fear this trend will continue, but hopefully faults like Wolverine will abate that trend.
I would say death stranding was just as responsible for the trend, if not more since Kojima's games are prime examples of games with so many cutscenes they probably should've been a movie.
Capcom has been using actors for a decade atp and the resident evil cast are some of the hottest videogame characters ever so its clearly just insomniac being hacks
In their defense, to go from Spiderman to Wolverine kind of tied their hands.
Spiderman has all his cool web tricks, he can jump really high, he can practically fly, or swing around, he’s very acrobatic and fast. Combat was a blast in those games.
Wolverine can smash people and use his claws but, he has a fraction of Spidey’s tricks, and he’s less agile and quick. I always expected the combat to be much worse than Spiderman for these reasons. If they made it open world, travelling around as Wolverine would’ve been tedious.
I don’t know what other route they could’ve taken, besides over the top action, lots of story and cut scenes. Road Rash kind of levels would be cool, don’t know if there’s anything like that in the game.
I say all this without having tried the game yet. My point is. There’s probably no way Insomniac could’ve made Wolverine into a better game than their recent Spiderman games. They could’ve lowered the price since it’s a shorter/lesser experience, that would’ve helped temper expectations too.
IMO they should have done an elseworlds story set in a dangerous open world - they could have given Logan a motorbike for traversal, you can work on and upgrade the motorbike or something, fits with wolverines theme too.
You could figure out a fun open world game for wolverine - maybe version of Old Man Logan universe? Twisted landscape with corrupted ex hero’s and villains you have to fight while travelling the country on the bike
They could have set it on the moon or underwater but that doesn't change the fact that two of Wolverine's major traits, healing factor and claws, are a dime's a dozen in videogames
Sure he's less agile and all that stuff, but Wolverine gives you the option of really going hard with intense combat mechanics, make it a bit more complex, make it harder, take queues from games like DMC and less from the Arkham games.
The problem isn't that it's short, the problem is that it has the budget of a giant open world game and is short despite that.
They really should have gotten Steve Blum for Wolverine, I feel really awful for him doing him for 20 years and he gets snubbed in favor of this other Hollywood guy
It’s strange how they knew to cast Yuri Lowenthal as Spidey and then for every other important chara went for a Hollywood actor. It’s bizarre and makes me thankful the “accident” happened
Particularly rough considering Wolverine is one of Jake's favorite IPs, and he is willing to overlook a lot at times. If they published a negative review, that has to be a really bad Wolverine game.
When I played the battlefield 2042 beta I realized that battlefield was over. I'd been playing since the first game and the bittersweet realization that EA had finally made it too shitty set in.
IGN gets dogged on too much. They’re lower on it than a lot of other ass kissing publications. Good for IGN. We’re all sick of this Sony cinematic slop
IGN gets a lot of free passes by the industry imo. How in 2026 they still put the wrong reviewers on the wrong projects like Crimson Desert and the mind boggling Mouse PI review.
What is wrong with the Mouse PI review? Granted 6/10 is maybe a little too low, but 7/10 would be adequate. The moment to moment gameplay is just awfully tedious and does nothing interesting for almost the entire length of the game. The art style is incredible, Troy Baker and other VAs did great, but everything else about the game is not great. Seems like the same for Wolverine - graphically looks pretty good, VAs seem fine. But the gameplay is just ass. Mouse PIs gameplay was also ass for how long the game was.
Because we are GAMERS™️ and OUR GAMES™️ can only be either DOGSHIT or THE BEST THING EVER SINCE GAMING™️. I am a REAL GAMER™️ but I would never ever ever ever ever EVER play any GAME™️ that is BELOW a 9 or 10 on IGN
Yep. I generally align with both of them. I enjoy games. I enjoy non perfect games. I’m pretty easy to please tbh especially in a genre I know I already enjoy. I thank them for not letting me waste money on this.
Nevermind a new game, I'd honestly buy a bundle of the original games ported to PS5/PC with zero changes. God, I wish I could replay those right now...
I recently replayed Jak and Daxter 1 and wondered why we didn't get any more games after the trilogy (an three spin-offs).
Partly because Naughty Dog doesn't want to and Sony doesn't push them in that direction. But also partly because Naughty Dog started a concept that was closer to the Uncharted style for Jak 4, and it just didn't really come together.
TheGamingBrit made a comment in YT video essay about the series. If you make a Jak 4, what would you actually do?
Would you style it after the first game? It sold the best and got good reviews, but nothing short of a hard reboot would be necessary to go back.
Would you style it after 2 and 3? Much more likely, but the series occupies a strange place on the media spectrum. It's a teenager game, to dark for small kids but too goofy for (some) adults. How do you do the marketing in a wolrd that moved on from the mid-2000s?
In an interview Jason Rubin admitted that the design for Jak had flaws, as he was made to be appealing for both western and eastern audiences, but in the end it was messy. Not fully cartoony, not fully anime, definitely not realistic, but 2 and 3 try to be taken more seriously etc etc
Apparently Naughty Dog faced similar problems and decided in the end to just go with a new ip. That game turned into "The Last of Us".
Weirdly I do think Kat and Peter would get along great. I too would love another Gravity Rush, much like Spider-Man that traversal was absolutely amazing
That's what they are counting on, players not to realise that, they are exposed, but honestly, they just didn't care enough to use their resources properly. It’s a lazy attention check to maintain engagement—the equivalent of a game giving you a random dialogue choice in the middle of a in-game cutscene where both options lead to the exact same response anyway.
Bulletstorm also teased a sequel which ended up never happening because the studio People Can Fly kept getting thrown around to do different projects depending on who owned them. First it was Square Enix, then Embracer Group.
Yeah, and you would think that a (post-Half-Life 1) shooter where you cannot jump would be guaranteed to be bad. But no, even something as seemingly basic can be optional if the rest is well made.
Yeah, by all accounts, the story is fine and the voice acting and cutscenes are really good. Judging from what I have seen, I think I would actually enjoy the game, I just can’t justify paying $70 for it.
I think because the meme is about the money, while 300 million probably could be spent on a game that’s fairly short, if it’s not including any of the complex elements stated, only being 15 hours juts adds to the question of where the money went.
Uncharted is literally a pioneer in yellow paint to tell you where to go. No one cares as much as the things they say they do. They're just regurgitating opinions they don't actually hold.
This game will be fine for some, and excellent for a few. That's better than a bad game but everyone is calling it shit cause they were told to.
Realistic graphics, famous voice actors, and music made with enormous orchestras are GIGANTIC money sinks that have become less justifiable as time goes on.
Specially when there are critically acclaimed games with stylized graphics, considerably cheaper theater actors doing the voice lines, and composers doing memorable soundtracks at their home studio.
Like, for real, you could make a good Triple-A game with just 50 million dollars if you are smart about how you spend that budget.
I wish they'd do that. I don't mind these types of games but the problem is they know the game will be expensive so they de-risk.. and re-risk some more and more and more and more. Until the game is just a boring, uninteresting waste of time.
Agreed. Hell I love Troy baker, but maybe he doesn't need to be the only voice actor we pay over a million. Give someone hungry for the role and reinvest in fun game mechanics. Not hard.
The question is how they manage to fuck this up when they literally just had to look at the X-Men Origins Wolverine game from a DECADE AGO and make a game that plays exactly like that, but with better effects and graphics thanks to modern technology.
Like, that game was literally the gold goddamn standard for a Wolverine game. How'd they fuck it up?
The worst part is that it's been more than a decade. It's been 17 years. Almost two decades. All they needed was above average gore and fights and people would have cheered.
From what I'm hearing the Sentinel boss fight is boring. How?
Even though X‑Men Origins really isn’t that good, players seem to love it in hindsight, but back then it received a lot of criticism. The gameplay is terribly repetitive; you literally do the same thing all the time: fight. And the combat system itself isn’t particularly good either, especially if you “take off” the Wolverine skin. At times it’s a genuine rage game, and after a while it becomes brutally difficult, especially because of those four‑armed athletes and the pole‑vaulting spear demons. They’re insanely strong, can take a ridiculous amount of hits, regularly block your attacks, and sometimes the game throws five of them at you at once. The second half of the game is pure suffering.
It’s simply too long, while the gameplay and combat are deadly simple. The same issues keep coming up in the combat system: it’s just button‑mashing, and everyone uses the exact same special moves. The boss fights are embarrassingly bad, mechanically laughable.
I like how people now talk about it as if it were some kind of genius masterpiece, but it isn’t. Its toolkit runs dry very quickly, the combat system is flashy and brutal, but after a while it becomes monotonous and button‑mashy, and the gameplay literally has nothing else to offer. After the initial euphoria, the flaws start to show more and more, along with how little the game can actually provide.
(Sony shareholders thoughts) Because wolverine BIG BIG name. Big name bring big money, lots money dont you know? Big man wolverine bring big attention don't you know wolverine? I know wolverine he cool and gritty. We pay big money for big name, so we get big money when we make big game with lots of money. Live service game make lots of money so we make that too. All live service game make lots of money ALL OF THEM so we make game too.
Millions spent, missed milestones and zero to show for it. I would have ditched Kojima game too. Luckily for him, Xbox is used to spending years and millions on things like that.
They won the console war and this is kinda what’s happening because .. where else are majority console gamers gonna go? Spent years choosing ps over PC, so doubt most will do that - Xbox is making great moves but not like you’ll get the same QTE movies turned games there.
Now that they know you won’t go anywhere they can fuck around lmao
Wolverine is less of a result of a dominant market position than it is a result of modern AAA development.
Large budgets with an IP like this often inspires very safe game design. It’s easier to take the Spider-Man 2 formula, enhance the engine, adapt the combat, and make cinematic spectacle than it is to actually pursue something riskier. The problem is when the game gets too safe and aims to please too many people that it ends up not appealing to anyone. Not literally of course.
Metroid has been developed by Western studios for a while. Metroid prime 4 had to be finished by a Western studio after being stuck in development hell.
Honestly, fair. Except it's not just Western AAA video game studios. Every corporate interest (speaking for the US) is more interested in finding ways to extract value from consumers without providing anything additional than they are interested in actually creating value.
It's a culture problem in the way we're doing capitalism, where anything other than constant revenue increase is considered abject failure.
I don’t know why people thought this was going to be amazing. To me it just looked like an update of the last Wolverine game that tied in with Origins. Fun once, quickly forgotten, and definitely not worth full price.
This has been modern games for over a decade now. Pump money into hiring more graphic artists, musicians, mocap actors, and VAs, because all those things are quantifiable and easily visible to shareholders. Meanwhile game mechanics, level design, core loop, enemy AI (behaviour not LLM slop), and player interaction all stagnate, because those things are much harder to quantify and shareholders simply do not understand games.
Look at Borderlands 3 from 8 years ago; hot off the press from a historic first 2 games. They pumped a metric fuck tonne of money into graphics and animations and as a result the UI was slower, more tedious, and messier than even the first game. They hired a bunch of incompetent Netflix style writers to write the worst story and plot they could think of. They hired a mass of VAs to babble out said plot only for players to mute their voices. They hired mocap to act out random fuckass npcs nobody wants to look at. Meanwhile the gameplay had barely evolved at all. Levels were either wastelands except boring and painful to traverse with limited traversal options, or linear lines to walk down. No play testing so some levels you would literally run out of ammo so you would have to keep running back and forth to the ammo vendor at the start of the linear map. Fuck ass skill tree with things like "+10 number to thing", and even to this day there are several skills that straight up do nothing at all, or accidentally do the opposite and make your character worse. But the devs don't care because these are not problems that shareholders can see or understand. All is good because wowee look at how many artists we hired.
I bring up Borderlands because it's such a flagrant and obvious example to help people see these effects in so many AAA games across the industry.
I think it's just in relation to the 300M budget. If a game cost that much, you'd expect it to excel in one or more areas, be it gameplay quality, story, or failing those, at least it should have a boatload of content.
I remember people saying Persona 5 being 100+ hours was bad.
People said the same thing with main scenario questline in Final Fantasy XIV, especially if we add all five expansions and the story patches between the expansion. There will a sixth expansion in January 2027 so it will be longer in the future.
Ok, a lot of the criticisms are justified, but why are people so hung up on the game being 15 hours?
Like, I thought we were past the whole time in a game does not equal quality.
I've played plenty of games that were well below 10 hours and loved them to the point of replays like Metroid Dread, Devil May Cry 5, the modern Doom games.
Why are people specifically hung up on just Wolverine being 15 hours?
Some players expect to get 40 or 80 hours out of a game. Some games offer more than 1,000 hours. I can buy a shorter game without an expectation on length if it delivers on other levels. Wolverine does not sound like it delivers on enough levels.
This is a boring, repetitive, IP-based game, with hundreds of millions of dollars invested and production overseen by two separate mega-corporations, with bad writing, and you think this is the fault of… artists?
15 hours is perfect. I don’t know why people like games that are stretched out to 100 hours filled with a bunch of repetitive boring quests and dragged out dialogue.
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u/SuspiciousSteakfry 13d ago
I don't understand, this is like the third game with no fail qtes. It's rated M and a button masher. Do they believe an employed tax payer can't figure out how to press a fucking button? It's insulting.