Spider-Man 2 PC Port Receives Harsh Steam Reviews, Ranking Among Lowest PlayStation Launches

The PC port of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 has received harsh reviews on Steam, and it ranks among the lowest PlayStation launches on the platform.

[-Foxtrot]

If they aren’t going to put the work into these then what’s the f****** point.

[PrinceOfAnger]

There are issues, yes.
but just look at this!

https://i.ibb.co/b52rW9Bm/S...

BTW spider man 1 was a better port in every way with big difference from console ver, what happend to Nixxes?

DF on spider man 1
"
The biggest upgrade of all? Hardware-accelerated ray tracing support. I'm happy to see a range of granular settings here, but very high exceeds the high setting typically used by PS5. Building geometry boiled down into flat textures on consoles are fully modelled on PC, texture quality is on an altogether different level quality, while the amount of associated world detail - and shadows - also get fully reflected, sometimes where PS5 has no reflections at all. Nixxes also offers PC users the chance to push out draw distance on objects/crowds/traffic beyond the console standard - and that ties into the level of detail/crowd/traffic settings I've already discussed. Just remember that the more you push RT, the higher the load on both GPU and CPU.

The biggest upgrade offered by PC concerns ray tracing, where we're looking at a night and day improvement in every single way."

[Levii_92]

The point is to make a bunch of money of these IP’s that should be exclusive.

[thorstein]

"As of now, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 has received around 4,000 reviews on Steam, almost 57% of which are positive."

[gold_drake]

i dont quite understand how they dont have a dedicated studio for pc ports.

i get it, its difficult for pc ports, but girl.

[Obscure_Observer]

"i dont quite understand how they dont have a dedicated studio for pc ports."

They do. Spider-Man 2 was optimized for PC by Nixxes Software, which is one of the best in the market.

For the sake of comparison Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered scores at 94.48% with 107k reviews.

[goken]

I see.
Why do you think recent PS ports are kinda problematic?

[VariantAEC]

Because Windows 11 and PC HW isn't as great as everyone seems to believe. Don't get things twisted, I'm not saying that a PS5 Pro will outperform an RTX 4090 never mind the 5090, but it comes way closer than the specs on every box says it should.

[Profchaos]

They do have a studio for this it's nixxies but yeah....

[lukasmain]

I think this is Nixxes' first real port that wasn't really good. A bit of a misstep by them

[Obscure_Observer]

Another big Playstation first party game underperforming on Steam due incompetence.

No preorders, No pre-download, No marketing and No review copies sent to gaming outlets

Sony restructuring its chain of command yet again at the same time that Ted Price retired is telling.

This reeks of Hermen Hulst´s poor management of Playstation´s first party studios. I wouldn´t be surprised if he just forced Spider-Man 2 to be released against Ted Price´s will to meet Marvel´s investors deadline.

No wonder why he will no longer be calling the shots and from now on will have to report directly to his former equal CEO and colleague Hideaki Nishino.

[Christopher]

Wait, they were equal CEOs but its only Hulst's fault?

[Obscure_Observer]

Hideaki Nishino as CEO of SIE's Platform Business Group.

Hermen Hulst as CEO of SIE's Studio Business Group.

Equal in power and decision-making. Different roles.

[goken]

I believe Hulst is in charge of game development

[Christopher]

Pretty sure Nishino (was) in charge of third-party relations and platform services, which would include Steam. While, sure, Hulst is in charge of studios, they both had to let it go to Steam in the format it is. I mean, even with Nishino in charge of Hulst, if he's so bad, shouldn't he be removed entirely since he'll just continue making the same mistakes? And aren't those the same mistakes many of the past games have had with needing early patches to fix graphical issues/optimization? At one point isn't it just the fault of the studio that made it and a 'general' policy at Sony to release by date and update.

Look, I'm all for Sony getting better, but this happened before Hulst and will likely continue to happen under Nishino. They just don't delay and rely on patches to meet requirements. This is a core issue with Sony in general, not just Hulst.

[ravens52]

I may be crazy but I gotta agree with Obscure on this 1.

[goken]

Yeah. He surprisingly makes sense right at this point. I believe he is on to something here

[PrinceOfAnger]

Spider man 2
26,444
all-time peak

What will you say about returnal ?
6,691
all-time peak

Ratchet rift apart
8,757
all-time peak

[VersusDMC]

12k peak for Indiana Jones but i don't remember any reporting on it's under performance... and before the gamepass excuses come out persona 3 reload had 40k and stalker 2 120k while being on gamepass.

[lukasmain]

Also Indy was a brand new day 1 release

[LoveSpuds]

Oops, that Indy stat is a bit of a hole in PrinceOfAnger's narrative 😬

[Hello_World]

Very popular franchises on PC.

[anast]

PC gamers mainly play Banana and counter strike

[lukasmain]

Maybe Sony shouldn't even bother releasing on PC anymore. There is a rumor they stopped developing GT7 and Demon's Souls ports.

[Plague-Doctor27]

I believe they meant lowest user rating, not lowest peak

I don't think Sackboy or Lego Horizon even broke 1000 peak CCU for example

[Tacoboto]

Both peaked worse than Concord

[ZeekQuattro]

Walloping websnappers!

[Profchaos]

In all honesty I'm a little worried about Sony abandoning PC ports Ragnarok only managed 485k in sales I dont think other recent ports have done well it may unfortunately come back to it not being worth the effort unless the sales pick up

[lukasmain]

Well if not enough PC players appreciate it, then maybe Sony should back off from releasing on PC.

[Plague-Doctor27]

The PC ports are stupidly cheap to make, the budget for Spiderman 2 PC port in the insomniac leak was $4.6 million. Even with Steams cut they need to sell barely over 100k units to make a profit

[generic-user-name]

Looks like they should have spent more. Now they've released a subpar product that damages their reputation as well as potentially damaging their relationship/trust with Marvel.

[Cockney]

Has their recent strategy of porting to pc been working? The sales aren't great for any of the games so far so why should they bother, there's been whispers that it hurts their image as in not being exclusive to the console so why not reconsider?
If they're honest with themselves sales have been piss poor over there in pc land so why not just cut them off, its not going to hurt their bottom line and it will restore their reputation in the console space, absolute exclusivity, with the exit of the xbox console as a viable competitor they should double down, make playstation the ONLY place to play ALL high end games, its a failed experiment, rethink regroup and cut their losses, conversation over.

[Scissorman]

Days Gone, Ghost of Tsushima, God of War/Ragnorok, Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West, Spider-Man/Miles Morales, The Last of Us Part 1, and Uncharted have all sold incredibly well on PC. Yes, there have been a few flops, such as LEGO Horizon, Horizon Remastered, Sackboy Returnal, and Until Dawn, but all of these ports are low risk, high reward for Sony. The threshold for success on PC is much lower because the porting costs are so low.

Overall, PlayStation's PC strategy has likely proven to be a viable revenue stream for them and I honestly don't see that coming to an end anytime soon. Spider-Man 2's situation is a head-scratcher though. While it will undoubtedly go on to sell a decent amount of copies, the port was clearly rushed out the door, and its poor quality has no doubt blunted it's opening weekend sales.

[Cockney]

Some fair points, my comment was in response to some of the nonsense above but yes now you've made me fact check and you're correct, a few million extra sales is not to be sniffed at and I'd imagine very profitable to playstation

[lucasnooker]

I think they rushed this port because of the hack and the unofficial port getting leaked so early. The original spider-man took 4 years to come to PC but spider-man 2 was only a year and 3 months

[anast]

Just think, there's a $2k graphics card out there just waiting to play this.

[ocelot07]

When you see comments on steam like this.

"Crashing on Ultra High End PC
CPU: i5 4460
GPU: GTX 1050Ti
RAM: 16GB DDR3
Display: LG G4 OLED 4K

fix your game plz"

I wonder if most the issues is that people just have garbage PC's. Remember folks just because you have a pc doesn't automatically mean it can play games at decent settings.

[fsfsxii]

“Ultra high end”
Shit costs 200$ to build, its as high end as a nintendo switch

[ocelot07]

That's a harsh comment for the Nintendo switch lol.

[porkChop]

That comment/review was likely intended as a joke though.

[ocelot07]

Maybe so but I'm fairly confident a lot of steam users are using low budget systems. Especially when the last 5 or so years Pc tech channels have been showing up to turn a $50 dell Optiplex into a gaming pc.

[SethNW]

It is quite funny, they forgot to market it, few days before release media were questioning if it is even coming out. Seems like everyone forgot about it and then Sony remembered and it went something like "oh, crap" and they scraped something together to "finalize it" and quickly release... :-D

I mean game didn't even have requirements listed few days before release, like go to Way Back Machine and check it out, it was bare bones Steam page with release date. There were no news up to release. Nothing. So I wouldn't be surprised if even developers forgot about release date and had to scrap together playable version quickly without proper testing, fixing and optimizing, since those are the last stage of development.

And it is real shame, because at some point it really felt like Sony had figured out porting to PC and they did pretty well. I mean even first Spiderman had pretty good port. Like I won't say there weren't any issues, there always will be something, but overall it was good experience. Second one, based on reviews, it is pretty bad experience. Didn't buy it, because this lack of marketing was suspicious at best. But I do hope that Sony does pull their act together, because they got good games and PC sales definitely could be great way for them to make more profits. Especially if they were selling world wide and wouldn't require PSN account. Since they could sell into regions without PSN. And it is funny how they could make it so that PSN is optional, but you get nice set of skins if you are logged in. Because most people would be "oh, shiny" and log in without much complaining.

[Terry_B]

1-2 weeks and things changed. Just never buy big games at launch anymore. Never.

[Dandizzle]

I have this game on PC and I'm not experiencing alot of the issues people are reporting? Game seems to be running really well.

[PRIMORDUS]

I don't know what was the rush to get this game out on PC, this shit needs to stop, delay your games until they are ready. At least on PC you don't need any PSN account crap 😉

[alexmarx]

I've played a bit, and unfortunately, the launch wasn't without issues: optimization is poor, with FPS drops even on recommended hardware. There are also bugs: T-poses in the opening scene, and enemies getting stuck in textures. Plus, the price of 60 isn't exactly cheerful, but thankfully, there are sites with activations, like SteamRent. I haven't been able to evaluate the story yet, as I've only completed the prologue, but I was really pleased to see full localization, including voice acting. I enjoyed the previous "Spider-Man" games by Insomniac, and this one, despite the community's mixed opinions, also hooked me. So, we'll be waiting for patches!

[Amphion]

5090 FE here and no problems at all.