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The story
Insomniac Games’ latest title, Marvel’s Wolverine, has launched on PS5. According to contract documents leaked in the 2023 cyberattack on the studio, Sony and Marvel reportedly agreed to a clause allowing either party to terminate their deal if none of three flagship titles covered by the contract sells 6 million combined PS5 and PC units within a year of release. On 5ch’s hardware board, opinions split over whether that sales target is realistic in today’s market, and whether Sony might just pad the numbers through free giveaways or console bundles if it falls short.
Marvel’s Wolverine launches on PS5 this week, and Insomniac Games’ new title appears to carry more than just the job of pleasing Logan fans — it’s reportedly also tasked with selling at least 6 million copies in its first year. This isn’t exactly new information, but it resurfaced on the eve of launch thanks to documents obtained in the 2023 cyberattack on Insomniac, which included details of the contract Sony and Marvel struck covering Wolverine and future X-Men games.
According to the contract terms that came to light at the time, Sony and Marvel have the right to terminate the agreement if one of the three flagship titles specified in the contract fails to sell more than 6 million combined PS5 and PC units within a year of its PlayStation console launch. That makes Marvel’s Wolverine a particularly critical entry among the mutant-related projects covered by this deal.
Source: gamevicio.com / Original article here
What people said
Finally free from PlayStation
It's the opposite
Can't you read Japanese?
There's a mountain of used copies flooding the market already, no way this sells lol
A planned escape from PlayStation?
(though apparently blocked by invisible walls and bombing runs)
If it's a licensing deal, they'd lose the rights and Wolverine sales would just get halted
How many games these days even sell 6 million copies?
Dropping the score 5 days before release also looks like a move to instantly shut down 'Kojima's' negativity (apparently referring to a specific critic/commentator's negative buzz)
Worst case, shove it into PS Plus and hit the number that way
Though that'll mean eating a loss
Sony could just buy up copies themselves and bundle them with consoles
They already made the official announcement that there's no need to rush console sales
So bundling it under the guise of console promotion would contradict that
And they can hardly admit 'we're bundling this just to pad Wolverine's numbers' either
Marvel probably just sees PlayStation as a walking wallet anyway
Or say 'Who needs Marvel!' and just drop it?
Why not just put it on Switch 2 too?
> one of the three flagship titles
So it's not just about Wolverine alone, it seems
Wonder if the others include something like Tokon?
Sony has already declared that going forward they won't keep single-player games multiplatform
How about a game where Hulk carries a woman on his shoulder and can smash pretty much anything on the map?
From Marvel's side, that's fine — it actually was fine with Spider-Man 2
But from Sony Group's side, it's no longer acceptable
To lock in the contract for the next installment, they have to give it away even if it costs more than it makes
Seriously, quit relying on other companies' characters already
Marvel's characters belong to Marvel
They'll never be PlayStation's mascot
Seems like Marvel's fine as long as they get paid the quota amount either way
I wonder if it's really okay to just hand over tribute money completely unrelated to Wolverine's actual sales
I can't imagine what kind of official justification they'd even come up with for that
Concord — shut down almost instantly
Ghost of Yotei — barely made waves
Marathon — on life support
Marvel's Avengers — a dying village at this point
Director — cancelled
Wolverine — already flopping out of the gate
Feels like another round of Totoki's cost-cutting axe is coming (Hiroki Totoki, Sony Group's restructuring-minded president).
Even after flopping this badly
they still won't put it on Xbox
So surely Microsoft's fine making TES6, Fallout 5, Diablo 5, and StarCraft Xbox exclusives too
Japanese media once surveyed Japanese gamers on which hardware they play on most (multiple answers allowed)
and the split was roughly Smartphone 80%, Switch 25%, Steam 25%, PlayStation 8%, Xbox 1%.
So even in Japan, combine Steam and Xbox — both of which put money in Microsoft's pocket — and that market is already 3 times the size of PlayStation's….
>Steam, which puts money in Microsoft's pocket
?????
Background and Key Points of the Discussion
This contract clause stems from reporting based on internal documents leaked in the 2023 cyberattack on Insomniac — details that had been known in some circles before but drew renewed attention with Wolverine’s launch. The thread split over how realistic the 6-million-unit quota actually is, with one camp arguing Sony could just hit the number through free giveaways or console bundles, and another countering that doing so would fail to recoup development costs and defeat the purpose. It’s also worth noting that the contract isn’t tied to Wolverine alone — it only requires that one of three flagship titles, including other X-Men-related projects, meet the threshold, a detail easy to misread as applying to Wolverine specifically. Whether this squares with Sony’s recently stated shift away from exclusivity was another point of discussion.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Gaming)) thread “Sony’s Wolverine Will Have Its Marvel Contract Terminated If It Doesn’t Sell 6 Million Units.”
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