On Monday, Sony announced that Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 has become the fastest-selling PlayStation exclusive of all time.
According to the company, the game sold over 2.5 Million copies in its first 24 hours of availability. As impressive as the numbers are, it does beg the question of if it truly is, as Sony puts it, “the fastest-selling” game for PlayStation.
This isn’t the first time that Sony has touted a new release being the fastest-selling game from PlayStation Studios. In recent years, the company claimed that the first Spider-Man, God of War Ragnarok, and The Last of Us Pt. 2 were all the “fastest-selling” games for the platform. But if you look at the numbers released at the time, it seems like the criteria for what determines the fastest selling is ever-changing.
When Spider-Man launched in 2018, it sold 3.3 million copies in 3 days and claimed the record. The Last of Us Pt. 2 sold 4 million in just two days, claiming the record two years later.
Then, in 2022, God of War Ragnarok sold 5.1 million in four days, which Sony also said was the fastest-selling game.
Now, we have Spider-Man 2 claiming the record. But what’s the actual record for? Each game’s claim to being the fastest-selling features a different time frame to achieve the sales.
If we are going to look strictly at the numbers provided, then The Last of Us Pt. 2 holds the record with four million copies sold in just two days. Spider-Man 2 might have sold more in its first two days, but we only have the first-day numbers to go off. If another 2.5 million were sold on day two, then it’s the record holder. Again, though, we weren’t given that data.
Of course, the claim is strictly for marketing material. The record doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but it’s still something that people will talk about. If it’s going to be touted as a success for games, the standard needs to be the same across the board.
Whether it’s using the first 24 hours, the first two days, or, in God of War Ragnarok’s case, the first four days, the numbers compared need to be the same. Otherwise, it comes down to just being a confusing comparison that no one will truly know how to take.
What do you think of claims surrounding Spider-Man 2 being the fastest-selling exclusive from PlayStation? For more Insider Gaming, check out what long-time PlayStation executive is leaving the company.
It’s obviously based on copies per day. Spider-Man selling 3.3 in 3 days tells us it may have sold only 1.1 million a day. TLoU2 jumps to 4 mil in 2 days. So obviously sold around 2 mil a day. GoW is the outlier selling 1.275 mil a day. Which shows they aren’t above hyperbole to try and push a game that maybe isn’t meeting expectations.
Unless the numbers above don’t divide evenly. For example, maybe TLoU2 sold only a mil in it’s first day, and then shot up 3 mil in the second.
Spider-Man 2, selling 2.5 in a day makes it the clear king of 24-hour tracked sales. It’s not hard at all to make sense of what the numbers mean.
Must just be a slow day for “journalism”, huh?