Marvel's Wolverine Is At the Center of the Most Complex Online War In Years

This September is jam-packed with new games, and Marvel’s Wolverine is the biggest of the bunch. Insomniac’s PS5-exclusive superhero game looks to deliver a brutal take on Wolverine that’s suitably faithful to the character. Given Insomniac’s sterling track record (which includes Marvel’s Spider-Man and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart), it should be riding your typical big-budget hype train right now ahead of the game’s Sept. 15 release date. So why are so many people so angry about it right now?

Over the past few weeks, social media has become a hotbed of hostility for Wolverine. Simmering rage boiled over after previews for the game dropped and revealed more about the action-adventure game. Some players weren’t thrilled with this early look at gameplay and have been posting up a storm across platforms as a result. The backlash has gotten so bad that marketing director James Stevenson referred to it as a “relentless onslaught that I cannot believe is good for anyone's mental health nor representative” in a post on X.

Is it simply a case of gamers not liking what they’re seeing? While that very well may be part of it, Wolverine also finds itself at the intersection of various internet discourses that make it hard to see reality clearly. It's a social media headache that should serve as a reminder that you should always be wary about what algorithms are serving you.

The backlash kicked off last week when hands-on previews of Marvel’s Wolverine dropped ahead of its upcoming release date. Those previews showed that Insomniac’s latest is a more straightforward action-adventure game than its open-world Spider-Man games. Compared to the open-world grandeur of those games, Marvel’s Wolverine is fairly linear and focused on delivering a cinematic experience. Some of the choices Insomniac made to achieve that have been lambasted based on new footage. Two moments in particular have been common targets: a chase scene where an enemy has a red trail, and a boss fight against a giant Sentinel that has been compared to 2007’sBen 10: Protector of Earth.

That reaction should be straightforward enough, at least in a civilized society. Wolverine looks to be following the playbook set by series like Uncharted and God of War, delivering a style of big-budget game that some players have lost their appetite for. Polygon’s own Oli Welsh delivered a down-the-middle take on it in his own hands-on preview, praising its lean feel but flagging its lack of depth as a potential problem in the full game. Case closed… right?

It’s a little more complicated than that. For starters, Insomniac has a long history of being used as a punching bag for gamers. In 2018, it found itself at the center of “Puddlegate,” one of the weirdest gaming controversies I’ve ever experienced. That sprung up after a player accused Insomniac of downgrading the graphics in Marvel’s Spider-Man ahead of launch, a claim entirely based on the developer shrinking some puddles between builds of the game. Then in 2023, Insomniac was the victim of a cyberattack, which resulted in early footage of Wolverinebeing leaked and subsequently dissected. Whether it makes logical sense or not, the studio has had a target on its back for eight years.

Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Computer Entertainment

That target got even bigger in 2024 when a culture war swept Insomniac back into the swells of discourse. That year, a subset of reactionary gamers lashed out at Sweet Baby Inc., a consulting studio that assists developers with scriptwriting, sensitivity readings, and other services. The company was accused of forcing diversity into games, an argument born from a wider pushback against “DEI” that was inflamed by right-wing politicians amid a heated election year. Insomniac enlisted the team’s help for games like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, saddling it with some particularly loud enemies.

Comb through Wolverine criticism on X and you’ll find posts mocking the linear gameplay interspersed with complaints about how Mystique isn’t hot enough and how Wolverine has low testosterone. You’ll often find Sweet Baby Inc. namechecked in criticism, alongside broader complaints about “Western” game developers. (A common talking point among this crowd is that Western-developed games are poisoned by “woke” ideology, whereas games developed in countries like China are saviors of that perceived push.)

That would make online conversations difficult enough to parse, but they are further muddied by something that doesn’t have to do with Wolverine at all. Earlier this summer, Sony announced that it plans to stop producing physical game discs in 2028. The decision was met with swift backlash from players that has since bled into everything Sony touches. State of Play streams are flooded with comments about physical media, while indie games like Duskfade have been caught in the crossfire simply because they are releasing on PS5. That’s happening outside of X; you can see it in YouTube comment sections and Bluesky replies to just about any PlayStation post. As Sony’s first big exclusive following the announcement, Wolverine has become the biggest target of that anger — despite the fact that it’s receiving a physical release.

All of these intersecting discourses make it difficult to tell which complaints are actually about Wolverine, and which ones are about something else entirely (and which ones are made purely in bad faith for purposes of chasing clout). You can’t look at a one-off tweet mocking a pretty standard boss fight without going down a rabbit hole to make sure that person isn’t posting that to advance a different agenda or willfully misrepresenting a game for ragebait clicks on a platform that financially incentivizes engagement. Convoluted drama like this is a consequence of an unhealthy social media landscape that makes life harder for anyone who’s simply looking for straight answers.

None of that is to suggest that there aren’t valid reasons to be skeptical of Marvel’s Wolverine, just as there are with virtually any game. It’s OK to be tired of a certain flavor of game, or to have questions about how mutants will be handled in a universe where the X-Men don’t exist. Video game previews are built to generate discussion, after all. But Insomniac has weathered several waves of bad faith discourse only to deliver well-received games on release. If you’re still interested in Wolverine despite the Ben 10 comparisons, the best thing you can do is tune out the noise, wait for reviews from critics you trust, and play it for yourself.