Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 swung onto PC about two days ago following the announcement from Sony that it, along with several other singleplayer PlayStation titles, would no longer need a PSN account. So far the reaction has been…mixed.
Let’s start with the factual data, shall we? So far, SteamDB, which tracks heaps of stats on Steam, has registered a peak concurrent player count of 26,218. Usually you expect to see the highest peak occur within the first few days of a game’s launch before they start to decline, especially in the case of singleplayer titles, although in rarer cases the numbers can continue to go up over days, weeks and even months. Helldivers 2 kept climbing for quite a while, for example.
Of all the studios under Sony’s purview, Insomniac Games is, without any shadow of a doubt, currently the best. Since Sony acquired them in 2019 they’ve released two successful console titles in Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, plus a solid VR title in Stormlands and a remaster of their first Spider-Man…
Those numbers would rank Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 as the 10th most successful PlayStation game on PC in terms of concurrent players, just a thousand people shy of overtaking Days Gone. Of course, concurrent players are not a precise measurement of actual copies sold. That said, they can provide a pretty reasonable estimator.
For comparison, the original Marvel’s Spider-Man is PlayStation’s 4th most successful PC title, attracting a peak concurrent player count of 66,436.
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is in 11th with 13,539.
The current king of the PlayStation PC hill is still Helldivers 2 at over 450,000. In terms of singleplayer games, Ghost of Tsushima has the most concurrent players at a shade over 77,000.
The Player Reception Has Been Mixed
Moving on from the hard data, the launch of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 has not been plain swinging. In fact, it’s currently the lowest rated PlayStation game available on PC with just 55%. Lego Horizon Adventures is the 2nd lowest-rated game at 58%. The only things rated lower from PlayStation right now is a Pistols & Perks DLC for Helldivers 2, and the God of War: Ragnarok soundtrack.
So what’s the problem? Well, at the time of writing the game has 3,323 reviews with a “Mixed” rating on the storefront. There doesn’t seem to be just one issue, rather a whole lot of them as users are reporting low overall performance, stuttering, ray-tracing not working correctly, crashes, potential memory leaks and more.
Even people running the game on monstrous hardware are struggling to get decent performance, it seems.
The good news is that the people who have been lucky enough to avoid the problems are having a good time.
It’s somewhat surprising the game is having such a hard time, as the PC port was handled by Nixxes, the team Sony purchased for their porting skills. Nixxes has had a fairly good track record so far, handling the majority of port work for Sony.
However, it’s also worth noting that Nixxes output has been ramped up considerably lately. Since 2021 the company has released 8 PC ports for PlayStation, with 3 of those being in 2024. They’re also handling the upcoming port of The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered.
In other words, is Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 just a rare hiccup from the team, or is it a sign that Nixxes is being overworked and taking on too much?
Looking forward, the reception for Spider-Man 2 will likely start to trend upwards as Nixxes will almost certainly begin patching the game. Other PlayStation titles have had rough starts and usually do get worked on at a rapid pace, so I’d expect to see updates rolling out soon. But that doesn’t excuse the poor launch. Sadly these days PC gamers are far too familiar with games being released in a poor state.