Another PC launch from Sony, another rough around the edges release, this time for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.
Earlier this week, an announcement came from Sony to do with its PC releases that was actually pretty welcome: it will remove its PSN requirement from some of its biggest single-player titles. That included Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, which at the time of the announcement was a day before it launched on PC. The game is out now, and while I’m sure many are happy they don’t have to sign in to a PSN account, reviews are not painting a pretty picture. Currently, across almost 4500 reviews, the game is sitting at a mixed rating on Steam, with many reviews criticising the game for being poorly optimised. Most of the reviews seem in relation to the game crashing, but just over half of the reviews are actually positive, so your mileage may vary.
Reviews aside, though, player-count launch numbers look like they could be doing a bit better. According to SteamDB, the game hit a concurrent player-count peak of 27,775 players yesterday, and at the time of writing it’s about a thousand under that now. There’s a chance it’ll beat that peak later today, as playtimes often do peak in the evening, but for comparison, the first game in the series, Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered reached an all-time peak of 66,436, more than double of its sequel’s peak, and the fourth highest played game on Steam for PlayStation (Helldivers 2, Ghost of Tsushima, and God of War sit above it).
There’s lot of reasons this could be the case; one is that a lot of players don’t even realise that the PSN requirement has been removed, something that has grown more and more infamous with each subsequent release from PlayStation. Another reason could be that a lot of these PlayStation ports have been rough around the edges at launch, which doesn’t exactly instill confidence in players. I’m sure an update for Spider-Man 2 is on its way, eventually.