Critics gave it a middling 77 on Metacritic, the lowest score any Insomniac superhero game has posted since the studio’s first Marvel’s Spider-Man launched in 2018. Social media spent launch week mocking its automated-feeling combat and a scent-tracking mechanic players nicknamed “fart gas.” None of that stopped Marvel’s Wolverine from becoming one of the biggest PS5 launches of the year.

The numbers behind the launch

Insomniac’s claw-wielding follow-up to its Spider-Man games released September 15, 2026, as a $69.99 PS5 exclusive. Within three days, sales-tracking firm Alinea Analytics estimated the game had moved 1.9 million copies and generated roughly $130 million in revenue — about 1 million of those units came from pre-launch digital pre-orders, with an estimated 22.7% of total sales on physical disc.

That puts Wolverine ahead of Sony’s other recent big-budget exclusives at the same point in their launch windows. Analysts estimate it outpaced both Death Stranding 2 and Ghost of Yotei’s early sales velocity, and its three-day revenue reportedly exceeded Death Stranding 2’s entire lifetime PS5 take to date. It also topped MLB The Show’s PS5 lifetime total of 1.5 million units and roughly $99 million. Kotaku’s analysis of the same data put Wolverine at sixth among PS5’s top-grossing games of 2026 — a list it joined after less than a week on sale.

A rocky critical and social reception

The commercial numbers sit oddly next to the discourse. Wolverine’s 77 Metacritic score trails every mainline Spider-Man game Insomniac has shipped, and the loudest complaints from players have centered on combat that feels overly automated, visuals that some argue don’t clear the bar set by 2023’s Spider-Man 2, and a sense that the $69.99 price doesn’t match the scope of the game.

The most-memed specific complaint was Wolverine’s scent-trail tracking system, which uses a visual and audio cue to guide players toward objectives — quickly dubbed “fart gas” online for its cloud-like effect. Insomniac shipped a hotfix days after launch that toned down both the scent trails and their accompanying audio cues, and the studio said it’s exploring an option to let players toggle the feature off entirely. Community and marketing director James Stevenson said the team had “been 100% listening” to feedback and was actively working on changes. Insomniac also had to publicly deny that the game contains AI-generated assets after a strangely rendered in-game sign went viral and fueled speculation.

Why the split matters

The disconnect between review scores, social media sentiment, and actual sales is becoming a recognizable pattern for big licensed and first-party releases: loud criticism concentrated among vocal players and critics doesn’t necessarily translate into weak commercial performance, especially for a superhero property with built-in demand and a marketing push behind it. Reports on the reception note that despite the backlash cycle, the majority of people who actually bought and played the game report being satisfied with it — suggesting the online criticism may be louder than it is representative.

For Sony, the launch is a meaningful data point either way. Wolverine becoming one of PS5’s best-selling games of 2026 despite a underwhelming critical score reinforces how much weight a recognizable IP and holiday-adjacent timing can carry, even when a game ships with rough edges. Whether that goodwill holds depends partly on how quickly Insomniac can turn “100% listening” into fixes that change the conversation before the sales curve cools off.

For more on how PlayStation’s 2026 exclusives are performing against expectations, see our coverage of PlayStation’s live-service strategy collapse and Nintendo Switch 2’s 2026 sales results.