Last year's buyout of Insomniac Games cost Sony almost a quarter billion dollars, as revealed by a recent SEC filing by the company. When Sony bought longtime "second-party" studio Insomniac last August, it seemed like an inevitable move given the closeness of the two companies for the last two decades, so no one was surprised there.
But one thing people were left wondering was how much such a purchase costs a company like Sony. According to the company's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it cost precisely $229 million dollars, and - always an absurd footnote to these deals - it was mostly paid in cash.
The acquisition follows a span of nearly two decades of exclusive development for Sony's PlayStation series of consoles. Since 1994, Insomniac was the creators of some of the brand's biggest games, like Spyro The Dragon, Ratchet & Clank, and Resistance. It's most famous these days, of course, for 2018's Marvel's Spider-Man, which had sold almost 14 million copies at the time of last summer's buyout. It was a commercial and critical juggernaut for the brand, averaging an 88 on OpenCritic from a massive pool of 162 reviewers, nearly all of whom (96%) recommended the game for play.
The studio began to dabble in various other platforms in recent years, including Oculus, Xbox, and even Facebook, but as the console wars now seem reinvigorated by a recent string of buyouts from Sony and Microsoft, it's likely the former has locked down Insomniac back to being an exclusive studio. Then again, more and more of the company's exclusives are migrating to PC, such as Death Stranding and, according to rumors, Horizon: Zero Dawn later this year.
The deal also puts into perspective just how much these moves cost. Microsoft in particular has made many of them lately, and while it's safe to assume companies like Undead Labs and Compulsion Games aren't fetching the same price as Insomniac, it's certainly not pocket change.
