While Sony has been putting a few PlayStation exclusives to bed (at least temporarily), it’s also used the PS4 generation to start up a whole new slew of PlayStation IPs, and in the case of God of War, resurrecting a few old ones. Sony isn’t about to let Horizon: Zero Dawn, God of War, or Marvel’s Spider-Man to be one-off successes. There are plenty of hints that Horizon 2, God of War 2, and Spider-Man 2 are in the works, and if a comment from former Game Informer writer Imran Khan is accurate, we’ll be seeing the Insomniac’s web-slinging sequel “sooner than we think.”
Khan, now with Kinda Funny, made the comment on a recent Kinda Funny Gamecast. Near the end (around the 1:40:00 mark), the hosts are discussing possible release dates for future PlayStation exclusives. “Spider-Man 2. Probably not coming at launch. I think it’s a Christmas 2021 title,” Khan says, to which co-host Fran Mirabella says that he doesn’t think it will be that soon.
“With as hard as Sony has been showing off [the original Marvel’s Spider-Man] on PS5—it being like, ‘this is how we’re going to prove how different this game is,’—I think a Spider-Man 2…” Here Khan trailed off for a moment. “I know too much about this, so I can’t speculate too much. I think Spider-Man 2 will come sooner than we think.”
Normally we wouldn’t given speculative comments like this any attention, but given Khan’s previous position at Game Informer, it’s likely that he holds privileged information about upcoming releases, some of which haven’t even been announced yet. For a title as massive as Marvels’s Spider-Man 2, it’s no surprise that talks would already be happening about exclusive reveals, cover stories, and studio visits for Game Informer stories (if that is indeed where Khan’s information comes from).
Sony has also been using Spider-Man to demonstrate the benefits of the PS5’s technology so far. It’s easy to speculate that Sony would want to follow that up as quickly as possible with Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on PS5 within the console’s first year. Insomniac’s Spider-Man released on September 7, 2018. A holiday 2021 release date for the sequel would be a full three years of development if Insomniac began work on the project immediately after finishing the first. Three years isn’t too far off from other PlayStation-exclusive sequels (barring The Last of Us Part II). Sony also recently acquired Insomniac as a first-party studio, which will allow the developer to focus efforts on this game and utilize the full might of Sony to make sure it gets finished up quickly. Sony will want to make sure that a great slate of titles fill the PS5’s first year if they want to transition people to the new generation more quickly than ever before.
[Source: YouTube; Via; Push Square]
