Cultured Vultures: While there's no doubting that Marvel’s Spider-Man is an amazing game, Tyler can't just gloss over its faults.
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.
Spider Man PS4 is one of thoae rare cases where a real high quality AAA game sells gangbusters.
The side missions did not have much meat on them, I'll grant that. I've finished all of them and they were not bad, just a bit shallow. I don't agree that they needed to affect the main story as that kind of thing is usually just a gimmicky illusion anyway where the main story happens just as it would have anyway.
"To test my theory, I purposefully ignored a side-mission that spawned directly from the main story. I wanted to see if it might alter the story, and you can imagine my surprise when it didn’t. I was still able to complete everything without any additional difficulty or notable alterations."
Did you play the game twice? How else would you "test" that theory? I'm not saying you are wrong. I'm just not sure that is a valid "test".
The lack of lock on.....nah. I don't see the need for lock on. The combat is so quick and reactive there is no real time to lock on to any one enemy. The timing is crucial in most cases and the act of engaging a lock on would have messed that timing up more cases than not. This criticism is a bit of a reach.
I don't know about a reputation system either. Not sure I would have wanted the distraction of worrying about damaging buildings and such. Sounds like a hindrance to the fun factor. Sometimes game devs can overthink their systems and make a game less enjoyable as a result.
Im guessing if this was made by nintendo, articles like these wouldn't exist.