Back in 2021, it was revealed that Insomniac Games was developing a Wolverine game. Just earlier today, a bunch of new information regarding this Wolverine game and Insomniac Games’ future titles were revealed by a hack and ransom attempt in which Insomniac rightly refused to pay.
It turns out that this Wolverine game is part of an even larger deal that Sony has signed with Marvel Games. As pointed out by IGN, Sony now has exclusivity rights to X-Men games until December 2035. For us fighting game fans, we now have to wonder what this could potentially mean for the Marvel vs. Capcom series.
“According to the document, between now and December 31, 2035, Marvel cannot release or announce any X-Men games on console, PC, or streaming platforms, or use an X-Men character as a ‘competitive advantage’ in a game,” wrote IGN.
An example outright stated in the document says that playing as Wolverine in Ultimate Alliance exclusively on the Xbox would not be permitted by the agreement. However, X-Men characters are apparently allowed to appear in “multi-family Marvel games.” Additionally, Marvel Games retains the rights for children’s games and X-Men games from the 90s.
That part about allowing X-Men characters to appear in “multi-family Marvel games” is important for the possibility of X-Men representation for any future Marvel vs. Capcom installments. Based on what we currently know, it sounds like we could still see the return of characters like Wolverine, Storm, Magneto, and Sentinel in a title developed by Capcom even with this deal in place.
However, this deal could cause issues if Capcom ever wanted to revisit the X-Men: Children of the Atom and potentially even the X-Men vs. Street Fighter series, which were the pioneer crossover fighting games that paved the way for the Marvel vs. Capcom series in the first place.
The last game in the Marvel vs. Capcom series was Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite back when it was released on September 19, 2017. Much to the dismay of fans, X-Men characters were omitted from the roster despite the longtime history and impact that they had on the series.
Ultimately, Capcom compared fighters like Magneto and Sentinel as being “functions” that could be replaced by Nova, Captain Marvel, and Ultron. Apparently there was even this perception that the modern Marvel fan might not even remember some of the X-Men characters.
Of course, it was more likely that Marvel forbade Capcom from using X-Men characters since they were seemingly attempting to devalue the X-Men IP until they were able to reobtain the movie rights from Fox, which finally did happen near the end of December 2017 with a $52.4 billion acquisition.
Due to this, the last appearance of X-Men characters within the Marvel vs. Capcom series was Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 with the inclusion Wolverine, X-23, Storm, Sentinel, Magneto, Deadpool, and Phoenix, though even this was a diminished representation of the X-Men franchise compared to Marvel vs. Capcom 2.
As of right now, it’s unknown if the Marvel vs. Capcom series will be able to continue due to the dismal performance of Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite which has rumored to have soured the relations between Capcom and Disney. At the very least, however, this deal between Sony and Marvel Games doesn’t appear to outright prohibit the possibility of a return at some point before 2035.