"It's a relentless onslaught": As Marvel's Wolverine faces backlash, Insomniac community lead calls out social media algorithms for pushing "negativity"
As Marvel's Wolverine faces criticism online, Insomniac Games' director of community and marketing has called out the "relentless onslaught" of negativity amplified by social media algorithms, saying it's not "representative" of overall opinion.
Last week, we saw a wave of Marvel's Wolverine preview content published online by different outlets, bringing a bunch of new information about Insomniac's next game and more footage to pore over. Critics have generally had plenty of positive things to say so far – GamesRadar+'s very own Dustin Bailey said that playing two hours of the game "crushed my fears of a post-Spider-Man slump" in his piece.
However, there's also been a massive amount of criticism from prospective players online following the reveal of new footage, and as you'd imagine, this hasn't gone unnoticed at the studio. Insomniac Games' director of community and marketing James Stevenson responds on Twitter: "I think the wild way this algorithm amplifies and forces negativity upon you has me reconsidering my philosophy on telling devs to look or post here.
"It's a relentless onslaught that I cannot believe is good for anyone's mental health nor representative."
While Stevenson doesn't point to any particular criticism here, you don't have to look far to find many, many examples. There's been a lot of negativity focused at one of the boss battles shown – specifically, against a prototype Sentinel – which'll see you dodging its massive robot arms and attacking them after it's missed and been left vulnerable, in a formula viewers note we've seen many times before over the years in other games.
Others have been slamming its linearity – one scene that's drawn ire sees Logan chasing down an enemy in a straight line amid explosions and gunfire, and while it looks very cinematic, folks have been left questioning how interesting it'll actually be to play through.
Things aren't exactly helped by the fact that a lot of folks are also using official PlayStation posts about Marvel's Wolverine as a platform to express their anger over Sony's decision to end production of discs for new PlayStation games starting in 2028. The backlash is understandable – people have plenty of concerns about everything from game preservation and ownership to the future of the secondhand game market – but obviously Insomniac has nothing to do with that personally. In fact, the devs have already noted that Wolverine's physical version will come with an actual disc in its box, but regardless, the situation means that Twitter posts and
are full of negativity around PlayStation's future, drowning out actual hype for the game.There's just under a month to wait for Marvel's Wolverine to actually release, at which point we're bound to get a clearer view of what folks actually think of it. After all, at this stage, its critics aren't able to look at the full picture, meaning that the hate isn't indicative of the complete package, and as Stevenson suggests, a social media storm like this isn't always even "representative" of what a game's actual player base thinks.
As Stevenson points out in a retort to one negative comment, Insomniac has an excellent track record of games with incredibly high Metacritic scores behind it. While, on the one hand, that'll certainly mean a lot of pressure for the Wolverine devs to deliver, this is also a team that's managed it many times before – hopefully that's a good sign of what's to come next month.