Marvel Approached Both Xbox and PlayStation to Create Games for Them With the Former Passing on Them

For the longest of time, Marvel has been a force when it comes to live-action movies, with Disney continuing to produce event films that fans have thronged towards the theatres to watch.

Compared to its arch-rival in DC, Marvel might have had more box-office success. However, the same can’t be said about the games, as DC has been killing it with titles based on characters like Batman and its vast array of heroes and villains with the Injustice series.

Following DC’s success in the games department, Marvel took a huge gamble in the previous decade by pushing to create better titles for players to enjoy.

According to a Resetera post, an excerpt of the book titled “The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 2: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and the Billion-Dollar Battle to Shape Modern Gaming”, Marvel had approached both Microsoft and PlayStation to develop titles based on their IPs.

According to Jay Ong, who was hired as Marvel’s Vice-President of Games in May 2014, the comic book company was looking for a publishing partner with plans for long-term investments.

This lead to Marvel trying to find a major console deal with Xbox and PlayStation. However, the former passed on the opportunity, as the green side was focusing more on developing its own IPs.

While Marvel faced rejection from Xbox, the blue side of PlayStation came huge, as Ong pitched his idea to develop a franchise for PlayStation that would rival the popularity of the Batman Arkham series.

Eventually, Marvel agreed to create exclusive AAA titles for the PlayStation, and the first major to come out of that deal was Insomniac’s Spider-Man title, which became a slam-dunk title, when it released for the PS4 back in 2018. Since then, a sequel involving Miles Morales has dropped, and in the future, PlayStation will be releasing more titles on characters like Wolverine as well, which has fans excited a lot.