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Box-office buster: Spider-Man’ on PS4 tops ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ with big debut

Marvel’s Spider-Man – E3 2018 Gameplay | PS4

Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man is one of the best games of the year, giving Marvel fans a chance to swing around New York City and take down famous villains in absolutely gorgeous fidelity. It seems PlayStation 4 owners have taken notice, as the game is now the fastest-selling exclusive in the system’s history.

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In just three days, Spider-Man managed to sell more than 3.3 million copies, making it the fastest-selling first-party PlayStation title ever. This number is about 200,000 more than what previous record holder God of War managed earlier this year over the same amount of time.

According to USA Today, the Spider-Man game had a significantly bigger launch than the film Spider-Man: Homecoming, which raked in $117 million in its opening weekend. With the $60 price tag of the game, it took in at least $198 million, and this number will only continue to rise over the coming weeks and months, particularly during the holiday season.

There’s a long history between Insomniac and the PlayStation family, with the studio’s Ratchet & Clank franchise dating back to the PlayStation 2 and the Resistance trilogy releasing on PlayStation 3. The remade 2016 game Ratchet & Clank was the fastest-selling game in the entire series, and it earned big sales thanks to terrific action and platforming. A tie-in film was released in theaters at the same time, but it flopped both critically and commercially. Some things just lose their charm when you take the interactivity away.

The success of Spider-Man all but guarantees we’ll see a sequel in the future from Insomniac, but we’re also hoping the developer returns to the Xbox-exclusive Sunset Overdrive at some point. Insomniac was proud of the original game, but its exclusivity to the less-popular Xbox One likely didn’t help it get exposure. That’s a shame, as some of the traversal and open-world ideas in Spider-Man feel like an evolution of Sunset Overdrive‘s mechanics.

Spider-Man is the latest in a growing list of great exclusives for the PlayStation 4. Just this year, we’ve already gotten God of War, Detroit: Become Human, Shadow of the Colossus, and MLB 18: The Show — and with several others on the way, there’s no better time to own a PlayStation 4.

Gabe Gurwin
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Gabe Gurwin has been playing games since 1997, beginning with the N64 and the Super Nintendo. He began his journalism career…
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