Enlarge / An officially released image for Insomniac Games' upcoming game Wolverine . (credit: Insomniac Games )

Acclaimed Sony-owned game development studio Insomniac Games became the victim of a large-scale ransomware attack this week, as initially reported by Cyber Daily . Ransomware group Rhysida dumped 1.67TB of data, including assets and story spoilers from unreleased games, a road map of upcoming titles, internal company communications, employees' personal data such as passport scans and compensation figures, and much more.

The gang said it chose Insomniac because, as a large and successful studio, it made an attractive target for a money grab. The ransom was $2 million, and Insomniac refused to pay it.

As a result, a trove of emails, Slack messages, slideshow presentations, and more hit the web. Notably, these included screenshots and assets from the studio's upcoming Wolverine game, as well as confirmation that Wolverine is planned to be the first in a trilogy of games starring X-Men characters. The materials also revealed that the company is working on another Ratchet & Clank game and a new Spider-Man sequel.

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  This game is all about tracing the rays, so to speak. It looks fantastic. [credit: Sony ]

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart will be the next PlayStation Studios game to make its way to PC, Sony announced in a blog post on Tuesday. The game, which debuted in 2021, will launch on the new platform on July 26.

Although Sony has been in the habit of releasing its big PlayStation exclusives on PC long after their console debuts for a bit now, there are a couple of things that make this announcement particularly interesting.

First, this is the first Ratchet & Clank game to be released on PC—that's after 16 home and handheld console releases since the first game was released on PlayStation 2 more than 20 years ago.

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  The spinoff game has a Christmas, winter setting. [credit: Sony ]

Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales , the spinoff to the popular and critically acclaimed 2018 PlayStation game Marvel's Spider-Man , launched on Windows PCs today, just three months after the original game did, too.

The game was developed by Insomniac Games (previously best known for the Ratchet & Clank franchise), PlayStation, and Marvel Games. This port is being done under the stewardship of Netherlands-based studio Nixxes Software, which was acquired by Sony Interactive Entertainment last year. The studio focuses on ports as well as supporting other studios' productions in various ways.

The PC port contains all the content from the original game. On top of that, there are several enhancements, including support for Nvidia's DLSS 2 and DLSS 3, as well as DLAA and Reflex, and AMD's FSR 2.1. There are expanded settings for ray-traced shadows and reflections, and as with the previous game, strong ultra-wide and multi-monitor support.

Enlarge / All images in this review were personally captured by Sam Machkovech on various PCs, unless otherwise specified. (The game's handy "photo mode" helps on this front, though such images are still representative of real-time gameplay.) (credit: Sony / Insomniac / Nixxes)

In two days, the 2018 hit game Marvel's Spider-Man will break out of its console exclusivity and land on Windows ( Steam , EGS ) as arguably Sony's biggest PC port yet. We knew Sony was bullish about selling more games on PC in the current fiscal year , but we didn't expect a critically acclaimed gem like Spider-Man , which previously drove console sales as a PlayStation exclusive, to make the transition.

The thing about PC ports, of course, is that they have to work on a wide range of machines. As of press time, the Spider-Man version we tested doesn't necessarily surpass the mix of stability and impressive technical performance that developer Insomniac delivered on dated PlayStation 4 architecture.

Such complaints might be moot when Spider-Man launches on Friday, August 12 —and we sure hope so. At its best, this game does whatever a PC rig can, delivering ultra-wide ratios, super-charged graphical settings, higher frame rates, and increased ray tracing depth. But while it looks great on a super-charged PC and impresses on hardware as weak as a Steam Deck, it's tough for me to comfortably recommend Spider-Man on midrange gaming rigs.