The theatrical release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day has seemingly led to Insomniac Games’ Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 getting a major sales boost. According to Rhys Elliot of Alinea Analytics, in the period since the movie’s July 30th release, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 has managed to sell 316,000 copies, generating more than $11 million in revenue on PC and PS5 over the two-week span.
Interestingly, Elliot has also noted that around 20 percent of the sales in this time period were for physical copies of the PS5 version. An additional 274,000 players also jumped in through the game’s availability on PlayStation Plus.
This has brought up the lifetime sales of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 to over 18.2 million copies, 92 percent of which were on PS5. In terms of revenue, this has translated to around $1.2 billion since the game’s 2023 release. Current player numbers have also been quite impressive, with more than a million daily active users playing over the weekend for the first time since its launch.
Elliot acknowledged that the high sales of the title could likely be attributed to smartly implemented discounts. However, he credits most of the recent sales to the release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
“Right now, these lifts happen mostly by accident. Brand New Day landed almost three years after the game. Imagine if a platform holder or publisher managed to align a major game and a major film. If only dev timelines and delays weren’t so hellish…”
“Movie and especially game development cycles are notoriously unpredictable, and syncing two multi-year, multi-hundred-million-dollar productions to swing in together is a logistical nightmare.”
Comparing recent discounts for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Elliot has noted that the period during the movie’s release contributed to around 2.4 times more sales on PS5 than it did back in February, when it was also discounted for the same $29.39 price tag. Similarly, the Steam version saw around 2.3 times more sales in light of the movie’s release than it did back in June. Elliot has called it “one of the clearest transmedia halo effects we’ve measured.”
Effects of the movie on the PC version of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 could be seen almost immediately after the former’s theatrical release, with the title climbing up the ranks in the weekend after Spider-Man: Brand New Day came out, and sitting at number 6 in the global top sellers list at the time.
It is worth noting that Elliot’s description of a movie tie-in game being developed and released alongside the film itself used to be quite common practice in the 1990s and 2000s. However, the games at the time were often considered to be of low quality, and eventually, the rising costs of game development around the PS3 and Xbox 360 era led to the practice essentially dying off.
In more recent times, we’ve seen games based on popular movies being released independently of a movie itself. However, this has seen mixed success; while games like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 did quite well, others like Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy failed to move the needle.
