One month before Marvel’s Wolverine hits PS5, the game has become the internet’s favorite punching bag, and Insomniac’s James Stevenson says the joke has stopped being funny.
Stevenson, Insomniac’s Director of Community and Marketing, posted Friday that the way X’s algorithm amplifies negativity has him rethinking whether developers should be on the platform at all.
“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,” he wrote. “It’s a relentless onslaught that I cannot believe is good for anyone’s mental health nor representative.”
UPDATE 9/10: The reviews are in, and IGN went 6 out of 10, with critics landing on story and repetition rather than the memes.
UPDATE 8/28: Insomniac’s new Features Trailer breaks down Rage tiers, suits, and day one New Game Plus.
UPDATE 9/4: Jean Grey’s full design history, from the hack leaks to the launch trailer backlash.
The “God Tier Slander” Clips
The post landed a day after Wolverine’s preview embargo lifted Thursday, which is when the mockery went into overdrive.
The biggest clip, as Push Square rounded up, put footage of Wolverine’s Sentinel boss fight next to a sequence from the PS2 game Ben 10: Protector of Earth.
It first went out in Spanish and pulled 50,000 likes, then got reposted in English with the caption “God tier slander” for 70,000 more.
Another clip with 20,000 likes shows Logan running forward for 15 seconds while someone holds a DualSense in front of the screen pushing up on the stick, captioned “Wolverine’s gameplay feels like that.” A third, sitting at 42,000 likes, overlays controller inputs on gameplay footage to show the player mashing R2.
The message behind all of them is the same: old, rote, unoriginal.
Push Square’s Sammy Barker conceded the Sentinel fight isn’t especially original but pointed out the same giant-enemy setup opened God of War II, and that the first round of previews mostly liked the game.
Stevenson was already in correction mode Thursday.
He quote-tweeted IGN’s story on why the X-Men aren’t in the game with an eye-roll emoji, telling anyone confused about Team X that they “are not the X-Men, nor do they replace the X-Men,” and adding, “And Team X is from the comics yo.” He also joked there’s a line in the game that explains why Logan’s suit heals itself, “lore wise actually.”
Why Wolverine Became The Target
None of this started with the previews. Insomniac has been absorbing hits all summer.
The July story trailer got buried under the physical disc protest, with commenters flooding every PlayStation post over the decision to stop manufacturing physical games.
Then Comic-Con brought a fresh look at Liam McIntyre’s Logan and a wave of complaints that the character model looks too much like the actor.
Barker’s read is that Wolverine is catching heat that isn’t really about Wolverine.
Social media is broadly fed up with PlayStation this generation, there’s a growing feeling that Sony’s cinematic action formula has gone stale, and the disc anger is still burning. The slander clips, in his view, are an attempt to shrink one of PlayStation’s biggest games of the year down to a meme.
The Pre-Orders Tell A Different Story
For all the noise, the numbers aren’t budging. Push Square checked the PlayStation Store’s best-sellers list and found Wolverine as the third most pre-ordered game in the US, trailing only GTA 6 and NBA 2K27, which holds two spots with two editions.
And the D23 sizzle that premiered Friday night played to a very different crowd. Kevin Feige introduced it on stage, a moment Stevenson called “full circle” for a studio that started making these games because it was inspired by the MCU. The YouTube comments, meanwhile, were too busy roasting The Hand to relitigate the combat.
The trailer’s rating card also spells out the M rating: intense violence, blood and gore, partial nudity, strong language, drug reference, and in-game purchases, with the footage captured on PS5 Pro as a mix of gameplay and in-game cinematics.
Stevenson Moves On
By Friday night, Stevenson had shifted back to cheerleading.
When a fan thanked Insomniac for shipping four new games and a remaster in under six years this generation, he replied that he tells every new hire they’re joining “one of the best groups of people you’ve ever worked with” and that they’re “going to actually ship /a lot/ of games.”
Saturday he marked the 30-day countdown with “One month! Can’t wait for people to experience the whole globetrotting adventure,” and told a fan who bought a PS5 in 2023 off the Wolverine and Spider-Man teasers that he’d never thought about it from that perspective. “It’s been a long promised game since that very early reveal!”
Marvel’s Wolverine launches September 15 exclusively on PS5. Sony first showed extended gameplay at June’s State of Play, and the same weekend Stevenson was defending the game, Marvel revealed the cast of its X-Men movie on the same D23 stage.
