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Marvel Games head Jay Ong has revealed that Microsoft turned down the chance to make licensed games.
Apparently, Marvel wasn’t happy with the general state of Spider-Man games that Activision had been producing. So it decided to pursue a new partner. Both companies, reportedly, agreed to end the licensing deal early.
In a passage from Steven L. Kent’s book The Ultimate History of Video Games Vol 2 (via ResetEra), Ong described going to Xbox with the deal.
“We don’t have any big console deals with anyone right now, what would you like to do?” Ong said. Microsoft’s answer was in the negative, because it wanted to focus on its own IPs. (Licensed games mean that games companies make less money then they would if they owned the IP outright.)
Not so with Sony. Ong described meeting with representative from the PlayStation company:
“I sat down with these two execs from PlayStation third-party, Adam Boyes and John Drake, in August 2014, in a conference room in Burbank. I said, ‘We have a dream that this is possible, that we could beat Arkham and have one game at least and maybe multiple games that could drive adoption of your platform.’”
Ultimately, Sony responded by offering to develop a Triple-A Spider-Man game that would be a PlayStation exclusive. That project was given to Insomniac Games. And that game turned out to be really good.