An Insomniac Games developer has said that representation is “so important” that it was integrated into the recently released Marvel’s Spider-Man.
Ryan Benno, who is the senior environment artist on the PlayStation 4 exclusive, responded to a popular tweet showing Spider-Man perched on the side of a building that has a flag sporting the colors of the LGBT community.
In honour of PlayStation's 30th birthday yesterday in the US, data company Circana has dug out figures showing the top 20 best-selling PlayStation video games ever (date-range Jan 1995 to July 2025). Don't get too excited.
This is a great reminder of how game sales have become more concentrated in a smaller number of games/series over time. In the PS1/PS2 era a game was a success if it sold a million or a few million copies. The GTA games (3/Vice City/San Andreas) were pretty big outliers in selling as much as they did during the PS2 era. So in the minds of a lot of gamers something like FF VII feels like it was as big of a PS1 game as God of War 2018 was for PS4, but in reality far fewer people bought it (though it has obviously reached additional people through remasters, etc.).
What this says to me is, not many people are buying a PS to play PS exclusives. Like so many false narratives, like Xbox gamers don't buy games! It seems Playstation as a default system is a vanilla system to play call of duty, Minecraft, GTA games and a sports games.
if you look back into the PS history, it has always been the 3rd parties who sells the most games. it was just that the PS1 and PS2 were so dominant that many of those 3rd party games were exclusives. so, back during the PS1 and PS2 days, the strategy was "to sell as many consoles as possible in order to sell more 1st party exclusives" to ride on that wave. The strategy to push many 1st party exclusives to sell consoles only started with the PS3 when many of those prior 3rd party exclusives went multiplat but more accurately, it started with the PSP.
Sony saw with the PSP, which was being trounced in sales by the DS, that 3rd party exclusives are hard to come by if you're not dominating the market. So they started building more 1st party games and when the PS3 were facing difficulties in sales, they knew they had to rely on their own to differentiate the PS3 from the 360. So the strategy back then changed to "release more 1st party exclusives in order to sell more consoles".
the only manufacturer that is still consistently selling their hardware to play 1st party exclusives, is Nintendo, and that was because they gave up the armrace for power thus they can't rely on 3rd parties anymore as all multiplats play better on competing consoles. AND that's also why they are the most ominous in going after emulators and also patent trolling!
so, you're not wrong there, but not an "aha!" moment or anything. it has been this way since the last, at least, 15 years for Playstation.
@zerobalance
So... what this tells you is that Call of duty, being the absolute check writer that it is, has been outsold by Last of us, God of war, 2 Spider man games..... Saying Playstation exclusives doesn't sell is like saying call of duty doesn't sell because they have outsold some of iterations. Does that make sense to you?
A modder has added multiplayer to Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered on PC, giving us the closest thing to the canceled The Great Web project.
A Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered multiplayer mod is in development by the community, and there's even early gameplay footage.
I agree. Insomniac did it without bragging about it every moment on the way.
See that's how you do it...you don't go on about it during the games build up, you don't make it a priority over the main game and you don't exploit that kind of stuff to market your game in the "hey look at us and how forward thinking we are, buy our game we're good people" kind of way
They did it right and let players find it themselves. Natural.
If it was EA you'd have a mission where Spiderman has to save a same couple, interracial wedding from being destroyed and get a LGBT history lesson in the process.
Noticed it in the game and thought it was really cool to have it in there.
I personally disagree (speaking as a POC) I highly doubt a majority of people who bought the game actually cared if it represented them or not they just wanted to play an awesome game.
That being said I love how it's done by an openly SJW dev like Insomniac Games, they didn't force it down our throats like a lot of other SJW devs do.
I just hope other devs take notice of the way it's done here, even if people don't agree or care for your ideals they can at least be put into a product in a respectful and calm manner without hurling insults at the consumer.