Insomniac says Spider-Man won’t be coming to Xbox—but it once thought the same about PC

While Sony has been porting many of its games to the PC platform, especially in the last few years, the Xbox hasn’t had as much luck. Despite Microsoft’s embrace of a multiplatform approach, Sony seems to prefer exclusivity and the PC at most. Or so Insomniac Games would love to believe, firmly denying that its Spider-Man games would ever be ported to Xbox.

As per tech4gamers, Insomniac Games very bluntly stated that in an exchange on X, telling a fan that an Xbox port of Spider-Man is “not likely.” Naturally, Insomniac’s Marvel games are a Sony powerhouse, funded, produced, and published by the Japanese gaming giant, which unsurprisingly prefers to keep its first-party games in-house and available on its own platform.

Insomniac’s Marvel games are absolute juggernauts. Image via Insomniac Games

However, Sony has increasingly played with multiplatform releases, porting games or even launching them on the PlayStation and PC simultaneously (i.e., the case of Helldivers 2). Insomniac itself once believed that Spider-Man would remain a first-party PlayStation exclusive, given that it’s backed and published by Sony, only for the games to eventually come out on Steam.

Microsoft’s embrace of multiplatformity seems to have also triggered similar sentiments at Sony. After the massive success of Helldivers 2‘s simultaneous launch (that, too, was published by Sony), the company seems more eager to do multiplatform releases. Microsoft, as I’ve said, only helped grow those sentiments, porting its own major first-party franchises over to the PlayStation, likely in anticipation of Sony doing the same.

It remains to be seen whether the Marvel games are part of this deal. A while ago, Sony did say that some franchises were console sellers first and foremost, and that porting them over would adversely affect PlayStation sales.

While that might be true, franchises don’t sell so well all the time, and porting even the most valuable games would be a smart move after some time spent in exclusivity (after sales start dipping).