Some easy questions for Insomniac's Ted Price, and some hard ones

As he ends a 30-year run, the head of the studio behind Ratchet, Spyro and Spider-Man talked to me about lessons from the game business, the time he stood up to Trump and what to do about game budgets

Ted Price accepting his selection to the AIAS Hall of Fame at the DICE Summit 2025. Photo: AIAS/Kinser Studios.

Ted Price chooses his words carefully.

He is the co-founder of Insomniac Games, the storied studio behind the Ratchet & Clank series, the original Spyro the Dragon games, and, most recently, a trio of critically-acclaimed PlayStation blockbusters featuring Spider-Man (make that, Spider-Men).

He’s been the head of Insomniac for over 30 years, a run that will conclude at the end of this month. He’ll be calling it a career at Insomniac, to make room, he told me last month, for new leadership.

“I actually do believe strongly that for a company to remain vibrant and dynamic, it is important for leaders to be willing to step aside and let others lead the way,” he said.

Price and I had a lot to discuss about his run at Insomniac when we chatted back at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas in mid-February. Some of it was pretty easy ground to cover, I figured. Some of it, perhaps not so much.

• What was the best decision he’d made during his time running Insomniac?

• What was up with that phase when Insomniac was making Facebook and VR games?

• Why did he and his studio record a video speaking out against the first Trump administration’s immigration policies?

• What should be done about ballooning AAA game development budgets, given the leaked budgets for Insomniac’s games?

• Instead of making a Spider-Man game, would they have considered making one about Howard the Duck?

• And so on…

One question I’d wanted to ask him for years was about the low price Sony paid for Insomniac. I often hear that deal cited as one of the craftiest purchases in the history of the business.

Bear in mind that, in 2020, Microsoft bought ZeniMax (including Bethesda, id, Arkane, and MachineGames) for $7.5 billion.

In 2022, Sony bought Destiny-maker Bungie for $3.6 billion.

Back in 2019, Sony bought Insomniac, a studio making some of PlayStation’s biggest blockbusters of the PS4/PS5 era, for a mere $229 million.

Did Price ever wish he’d asked for more?

“I am happy that we are part of Sony,” he told me.

See what I mean about carefully-chosen words? The man’s been doing interviews for decades. He even acknowledged that I had to see his reply coming.