Insomniac Signs With EA Partners, Developing New Game For PS3, Xbox 360

Insomniac Games isn't owned by Sony, but no one would blame you for thinking so, as the studio's been a loyal, nearly first-party Sony developer since the PlayStation 2 days. That changes today, however, as Insomniac announced a deal with EA Partners for a brand-new game (read: not Ratchet & Clank or Resistance) that will be released on PlayStation 3....and Xbox 360. Oh, yes.



Like Respawn's deal with EA Partners and Bungie's deal with Activision, Insomniac will own the rights to this new game. Insomniac does not own Ratchet & Clank or Resistance, Sony does. The Sony ties also means Insomniac has exclusively developed for the PlayStation platform for years and years.

"We decided to do a multiplatform title a while ago," said CEO Ted Price to me in an interview conducted yesterday, "and we began looking around for publishers who have a global reach, who are multiplatform and have an expertise in marketing and all the distribution [connections] and all the things that we need help with as a developer. After talking to [EA Partners], we found that we were really compatible in terms of our creative approach and our mutual focus on quality over quantity and certainly you can't argue with EAP's success over the last several years. It ended up being a great fit."

In addition to expanding its reach to Xbox 360 owners, Insomniac is changing up their development process. Insomniac is famous for efficiency and has stuck to annual releases for a number of years. With PlayStation 3, Insomniac had been swappingRatchet & Clank and Resistance every other year. Perhaps in response to widespread Resistance 2 critiques, that's changing going forward.

"You may be wondering why we’re announcing this game now, and how it relates to our existing projects," said Price in a blog post to fans at Insomniac's web site. "We’ve been developing games on an annual pace during the last 16 years. One thing that has become apparent to us though is that in order to live up to our own high standards of quality, we want to give ourselves more development time to iterate and polish our games. All future Insomniac titles will benefit from longer development cycles, which will directly benefit you, our fans."

Price also reiterated its commitment to Sony fans and the PlayStation platform, confirming the studio would make more PlayStation 3-only games down the line. A hint towards the rumored Resistance 3?

There are no details on the new game other than its target platforms. We won't hear about the game next month at E3 and Price told me it's unlikely we'll be hearing any more for a while (probably next year). You can read everything I managed to pull out of Price in an interview that went up today.

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