The Waiting Game Nobody Asked For
When a developer goes quiet on a sequel, players don’t sit idle – they circle back. That’s exactly what’s happening with Insomniac Games and Marvel’s Spider-Man 3. With no release window, no trailer, and no official confirmation beyond vague corporate statements from Sony, the community has filled the silence the only way it knows how: by replaying Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales from the beginning and timing every last web swing.
Speedrun communities on Twitch and YouTube have seen a quiet but measurable uptick in Miles Morales activity over the past several months. New runners are entering the category, veteran runners are returning to optimize routes they abandoned, and casual viewers are tuning in to watch a game they finished years ago be torn apart at the seams. The timing lines up almost exactly with the point at which Spider-Man 3 hype peaked and then flatlined into radio silence.
Anticipation, when it has nowhere to go, becomes nostalgia with a stopwatch.
Why Miles Morales Specifically
Miles Morales has always been the more speedrun-friendly entry in Insomniac’s Spider-Man series. The game is shorter by design – a focused, eight-to-ten hour experience compared to the sprawling main titles – which makes it far more approachable for runners who don’t want to commit to a four-hour marathon every attempt. Any% runs can be completed in under ninety minutes at a competitive level, which keeps the category accessible and the barrier low for newcomers who want to see what the routing looks like before committing to learning it.
The game’s movement mechanics also reward deep knowledge in ways that reward replay. Miles has abilities the original Peter Parker doesn’t – Venom-powered traversal tricks, specific momentum cancel techniques tied to his bioelectricity, and a camouflage mechanic that runners have found ways to exploit for skipping encounter triggers. Every few months, someone finds a new wrinkle in the movement system, and those discoveries are pulling veteran runners back in to see where the new ceiling sits. A route that was considered optimized eighteen months ago has already been revised multiple times in 2024 alone.
There’s also a story dimension to this. Miles Morales as a character is narratively central to where Spider-Man 3 is likely heading, given how Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 ended. Running his standalone game isn’t just nostalgia – for a portion of the community, it functions as deliberate preparation, a way of staying close to the character and his mechanics before the next chapter eventually arrives.
The Insomniac Silence and What It’s Doing to the Fanbase
Insomniac has been unusually quiet since Spider-Man 2 shipped in late 2023. The studio faced a significant data breach that reportedly exposed internal project details, and the fallout from that event appeared to affect how carefully the team and Sony manage information going forward. The result has been near-total silence on anything Spider-Man 3 related, with Sony offering only the occasional non-answer during investor calls and press events. For a franchise that had maintained a fairly steady cadence of reveals and community engagement, the absence is noticeable.
That kind of silence does something specific to an engaged fanbase. It removes the forward momentum that marketing normally provides – no trailer to analyze, no release date to count down to, no screenshots to dissect. Without that forward pull, fans don’t simply wait passively. They turn to what already exists and engage with it more intensely. This is the same pattern that FromSoftware’s communication gaps have produced in the Dark Souls community – extended quiet periods reliably send players back into previous entries, often at a competitive level. Speedrunning becomes a way to stay connected to a franchise when the franchise itself isn’t giving you anything new to hold onto.
The community discussion threads on speedrunning forums and Discord servers are telling. Runners openly acknowledge they’re running Miles Morales partly to scratch the itch that Spider-Man 3 news would otherwise be scratching. Some are treating it as a holding pattern. Others have gone deep enough into the category that what started as distraction has become genuine competitive investment – they’re not waiting to stop running, they’re waiting to see how good they can get before the sequel finally shows up and resets everyone’s attention.
A Community Running on Its Own Energy
What’s developing around Miles Morales speedrunning right now is almost entirely self-sustaining – no developer updates, no anniversary events, no remaster announcement to provide external fuel. Runners are setting records, sharing clips, and building routes entirely on the momentum of their own enthusiasm, and the longer Insomniac stays silent on Spider-Man 3, the more time that community has to compound on itself. The real question isn’t whether the category will stay active – it’s whether Spider-Man 3 will arrive before the community has fully solved every frame of the game it’s been given to work with.
