Shortly before the launch of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on PC, many gamers questioned why neither Sony nor Insomniac made an effort to promote the release with a proper marketing campaign, with theories ranging from the underwhelming performance of God of War Ragnarök on PC discouraging the studios to spend additional money on ads to Sony testing whether their ports even need promotion in the first place. Now that the game is out, the community has identified another potential reason for the lack of fanfare – and, unfortunately for Spider-Man fans, it’s not a pleasant one.
Insomniac
Described concisely as “good game – horrible port” by many, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 launched on Steam to “Mixed” reviews, with only 56% of players giving it a positive rating. Much like the 2023 port of The Last of Us, the bulk of negative feedback revolves around the game’s abysmal optimization and a variety of bugs and glitches that, for some, make it borderline unplayable even on high-end hardware.
Some of the performance issues highlighted by the community include frequent crashes, framerate drops, lighting and shadows bugs, audio bugs, missing textures, broken DLSS, the game freezing, T-posing characters, characters becoming naked in cutscenes, character models missing limbs, heads, and whole bodies, GPU overheating, long loading times, visual glitches, and the game mixing up the square and triangle prompts in QTEs, just to name a few. Given the extent of these problems, the general advice among gamers is to hold off on purchasing until Nixxes Software, the studio responsible for the port, ships a patch or two to address the issues.
As for the game’s performance (the other kind), Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 has peaked at just over 18,000 concurrent users on Steam, which might still go higher – after all, it’s been less than 24 hours since the launch, and we’ve got the weekend ahead of us – but given the track record of Sony’s PC ports, even if it does, it will likely see a sharp decline in the coming weeks, compounded by the technical issues at launch.
Speaking of Sony, yesterday, the company announced its plans to remove one of the most frustrating and widely lambasted features of its PC ports – the mandatory PSN requirement – from some of its games, including Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. However, an interesting caveat remains: one of the main reasons gamers dislike PSN – region-locking – still persists, and even without mandatory account linking, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 seemingly remains unavailable for purchase in 136 countries and territories, according to SteamDB.
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