Recently came the news that the character of Spider-Man will be a PlayStation exclusive in the upcoming “Marvel’s Avengers” game from “Tomb Raider” developers Crystal Dynamics.
It’s not a major surprise, the Spider-Man franchise is built on Sony’s relationship with Marvel and thus the character is exclusive to the studio in both film and gaming for now. Even so, the move has generated some controversy.
Crystal Dynamics co-head Scot Amos has addressed the criticism, telling ComicBook.com that it simply comes down to Sony having exclusive access to the web-slinger:
“[It] comes back to the relationship with PlayStation and Marvel. When it comes down to choices of where and what Spider-Man can be, that’s a relationship question that PlayStation absolutely has the rights to, that as you guys know, with Sony’s ownership there, and Marvel with Sony saying, ‘Hey, this is something we can do. This is something we can do on this platform.’
[We] love the idea of being able to bring this character to the PlayStation players. People will get fixated on one thing as opposed to, ‘Oh by the way, you’re going to have hundreds of hours of content and years of storylines coming ahead of us, and new worlds and regions, and new heroes, and more stuff we haven’t even announced yet.’
But I really do think people will look at this and say, ‘Yeah, okay, we get that, we can understand the business behind that’, but in general, we’re making this game for everybody. We want this to be the place you get to play those superhero fantasies out with your Avengers team, that continue growing with new characters, characters you ain’t even guessed at yet.”
It has already been confirmed that owners of the title on PlayStation 4 will get a free upgrade on PS5. There’s also plenty more content to come in the game in coming months.
