Insomniac Wants To Make Sunset Overdrive 2, But There's A Problem

One of the surprise exclusives for the Xbox One was Insomniac Games' Sunset Overdrive. The game allowed players to create their own character and fight through hordes of energy drink mutants. Well, the original shooter could get a sequel, but there's a problem: there's no publisher.

As revealed on Insomniac Games' official Twitter account, the developers are more than willing to pick up where the last game left off, giving gamers more over-the-top, open-world, third-person, platforming-shooting action but the studio can't find a publisher at the moment. I mean, games aren't going to fund themselves, right?

The original Sunset Overdrive came out back in 2014 and was funded by the Microsoft Game Studios as an Xbox One exclusive. The game centered around players having to battle through a city overtaken by mutants who were originally humans. Said humans became deformed after drinking FzzCo's OverCharge Delirium XT, plunging the town of Sunset City into chaos, carnage and destruction.

Despite the game being a post-apocalyptic third-person shooter, Sunset Overdrive was surprisingly bright and happy looking. It was a complete departure from the common post-apoc zombie games where players are surviving through dreary dystopian cities, similar to The Last of Us, State of Decay or Dead State.

The issue, however, is that Sunset Overdrive was a story-oriented action game, focused mostly on a single-player adventure campaign with a secondary multiplayer mode that didn't really stand out enough to warrant a lot of attention. A lot of companies these days are more concerned with multiplayer, as evident with the growing surge of Battle Royale-style games such as Playerunknown's Battlegrounds or Fortnite's Battle Royale mode, which is available to download for free. Both games have managed to rack up more than 10 million players.

Microsoft seems disinclined at the moment to pursue high-end single-player experiences, as evident with the cancellation of Platinum Games' Scalebound. Pitching to Microsoft the concept of yet another single-player, campaign-driven adventure game seems like a bad move, especially with the company focusing on games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds or the microtransaction-driven Minecraft.

The fact that it's been three years since Sunset Overdrive released on the Xbox One, and how Microsoft has made no effort in courting the franchise back into its graces seems to indicate that Microsoft has no intention of further pursuing a sequel at the moment, or other games like it.

Some gamers have hoped that perhaps Sony will step in and pick up the publishing rights, but it seems a little far fetched at this point for Sony to come in and publish a game that Microsoft had originally funded. One thing is for sure: Insomniac Games doesn't appear to be to be getting any help for funding Sunset Overdrive 2 from Microsoft. The game is still available to purchase for the Xbox One, along with the subsequent DLC that became available for it.