Hackers leak nearly 2TB of data after hacking Sony developer Insomniac Games
On December 12th, a ransomware hacker group named Rhysida revealed that it had been able to get access to 1.67 terabytes of data from one of Sony's game studios, Insomniac Games, known for Ratchet & Clank, Spider-Man, and many other prolific titles. Rhysida demanded that Insomniac Games pay a 50 Bitcoin ($2 million USD) ransom, or face having tons of internal data and private files leaked onto the internet. When the deadline passed without the ransom having been paid, the hacker group followed through on their threat, uploading the nearly 2TB of data they had illegally obtained, for anyone to download.
Information included in the leak ranges from sales data, Insomniac's projects through 2035, company emails that discuss other unannounced titles from fellow Sony developers such as Guerrilla Games and Bluepoint Games, in-development footage, design documents, licensing agreements, legal documents, and even employee data, including passports, phone numbers, and home addresses.
The documents show that following the release of Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Insomniac has plans for a Wolverine game, which we already knew from Sony's 2021 Showcase. However, it also reveals that the studio has further Marvel games it plans to work on, including a dedicated Venom game, a Spider-Man 3, a new Ratchet & Clank, an X-Men video game, and two brand new IPs. There's plenty of gameplay and concept art leaked, but most notably, an entirely playable PC build of the game has leaked as well.
Insomniac's Venom game is set to be titled Venom: Lethal Protector, and will bridge the gap between Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3. You'll be able to play as Venom, as well as the other Spider-Men, against an enemy named Carnage. It'll be an 8-10 hour singleplayer game, according to the pitch documents.
Not only is there a playable build of Marvel's Wolverine, but there's also an incredibly early dev build of the new Ratchet & Clank game, showing a glimpse of what the project might become eventually.
We can see from the sales data that the PC ports of Sony games that Horizon Zero Dawn performed the best out of all the Sony-published games on Steam, with 3.3 million sales, while the recent Spider-Man PC port has already sold 1.3 million copies.
Other data on upcoming games includes the name of Horizon series developer Guerrilla Games' new project. Titled Hunter's Gathering, leaked documents show that this will be an online multiplayer take on the Horizon series.
One of the slides from the leak shows PlayStation's approach to "industry threats", such as Microsoft's buyout of Activision Blizzard. To Sony, Microsoft's plans to build a mobile gaming storefront, as well as the prior juggernaut of a storefront that Battle.net is, are a problem, as it shows that Sony is behind the times in both the mobile and PC gaming market. For them, a premium sales model is their "central approach". They also see that free-to-play games with high quality gameplay are unsustainable, even with subscriptions. From Sony's point of view, there is no perfectly unified experience that merges PC, console, and mobile together, despite Microsoft's attempts.
This is one of the largest video game company hacks in recent times. While CD Projekt Red, Capcom, and even Nintendo have seen breaches and data uploaded online, it rarely offers this much insight into a develoer's future projects and internal information. Sony has commented on the hack, but only in the manner of stating that they're aware a cyber-security issue is ongoing at Insomniac Games.
