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Spider-Man will not appear in the PC version of Marvel’s Avengers

The wall-crawling web-slinger goes Playstation only

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We’ve been keeping an eye on the various announcements related to the upcoming Marvel’s Avengers game, and one of the big remaining questions was which characters are going to fill out the rest of the roster. Will any X-Men show up? Will the be any Guardians of the Galaxy cameos? How about The Punisher or Silver Surfer? The way that comic book characters can cross over with different teams and squads leaves a lot of opportunity for expanding the cast of playable characters here. We know the Avengers heavy-hitters will be there, with the initial lineup of playable characters being Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, and Hawkeye will be there day one, plus Ms. Marvel will be joining up with the Avengers at some point throughout the story. Well we’ve just heard from Square-Enix about another character that will be playable in the game, and it’s not all good news.

On the positive side, Peter Parker’s Spider-Man will be joining the cast of Marvel’s Avengers. On the negative side, that only applies to people who are playing on PlayStation. The PC version and the Xbox version will not feature Spider-Man in any capacity. The news is dropped over on the PlayStation Blog, and as far as we can tell this is not simply a timed exclusive, but a permanent arrangement. Spider-Man will never be available in the PC or Xbox version. Spider-Man will be made available as free DLC on the Playstation version at some point in 2021, after the game’s September 2020 release.

It’s frustrating, but perhaps not completely unexpected. The exact rights and agreements between Marvel and Sony are not entirely known publicly. Sony famously purchased the exclusive rights to produce Spider-Man live-action movies back in the 90s, and they’ve been clinging onto those rights ever since. A subsequent deal between Sony and Marvel has resulted in Spider-Man appearing in the Marvel produced MCU movies. Full terms of these negotiations have never been fully disclosed, but it’s entirely feasible that the various different gaming deals Sony have made with Marvel were part of the same renegotiations from September 2019 that extended the partnership agreement between Sony and Marvel with regard to the movies. Perhaps tagged on to those discussions was that Sony could fund and release their own exclusive Spider-Man game, and in the planned big-budget multi-platform Avengers game, Playstation would be the only platform to feature Spider-Man. Clearly Sony doesn’t own any kind of exclusive ownership of Spider-Man for video games, he did feature in the Switch exclusive, Nintendo published Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3. Whatever deal is in place, it’s being agreed on a game by game basis, rather than a broad-reaching comprehensive situation.

It kind of sucks for people who love Spider-Man and who wanted to play this game on any platform other than a PC. Now you have to choose between playing on your platform of choice, or playing as one of your favorite superheroes. It’s tough to imagine a game with so many playable characters nailing the feeling and controls of being Spider-Man, it’s something that many Spider-Man games have struggled with. Is this really going to be the best showcase of Spider-Man’s abilities? If characters can be pulled out of the game on the whims of corporate overlords, to what extent are these individual characters integral to the plot of the game? We don’t actually know which version of Spider-Man it is yet, is it going to be the same depiction of Peter Parker we saw in the 2018 PS4 game, could it maybe be based on or at least inspired by the Tom Holland version from the current movies? Could perhaps Tobey Maguire come out of retirement? We’ll have to wait and see.

The game is already facing somewhat of an uphill battle after multiple unimpressive showings, and this latest news could be another blow to its chances. I’m sure this game will do at least OK, but I’m not so sure it’s going to successfully deliver on its potential. This is one of the biggest pop culture properties on the planet, but reception still seems tepid. Will removing Spider-Man from the PC version impact your sentiment to this game? Will you opt not to buy it, or will you opt instead for the PS4 version? Let us know in the comments.

AT WEPC

Lewie Procter

Lewie skews Chaotic Good where possible, and loves pressing buttons, viewing pixels and listening to sounds. He's written for publications like Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, VG247 and Kotaku UK, and spent 13 years running Savy Gamer. If you ever get the chance you should ask him to tell you the story about that time he had a fight with a snake on an island off the coast of Cambodia.

1 thought on “Spider-Man will not appear in the PC version of Marvel’s Avengers”

  1. No Spidey for PC players (and xboxers too I guess)
    Guess I’ll go play something else then.
    Spidey’s been one of my go to guys for decades but I”m not paying half a grand to play him on a system I didn’t want to buy.

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