Numbers first: Marvel’s Spider-Man, from Insomniac Games, was released on September 7, 2018, exclusively for PlayStation 4, sold 3.3 million units in its first three days and passed 9 million by November 2018. In July 2019, another record came: Mat Piscatella, an analyst at the NPD Group, an American market research firm, reported that the game had surpassed Batman: Arkham City to become the best-selling superhero game in history in the United States.
On the same occasion, Piscatella posted on Twitter the top 10 of hero games in the American market, considering the history tracked by NPD. The original post is no longer available on the social network:
Translated from the jargon: NPD tracked sales in the American retail market and was, at the time, the main reference for comparing game performance in the United States. Dethroning Arkham City, released in 2011, with less than a year of sales shows the size of the launch. And there’s a curious detail: it was the first licensed game in Insomniac’s 22-year history and took about four years to complete.
The reception helped a lot. The Metacritic average was 87, with praise for the gameplay, visuals, story and characters, and many people placed it among the best superhero games ever made. In practice, this means the game sold well on its own merits, and not only because of the character’s name.
What came next
By August 2019, Marvel’s Spider-Man had already passed 13.2 million units. The game got The City That Never Sleeps expansion at the end of 2018, a remastered PS5 version on November 12, 2020 and the PC version on August 12, 2022. The series grew with Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, in November 2020, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, in October 2023. By May 2022, the franchise already totaled more than 33 million units sold.
Where to buy
Source: NPD Group, via Eurogamer.
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