In an ambitious move to bring one of its flagship titles to the PC community, PlayStation released Marvel's Spider-Man 2 on January 30, 2025. However, despite the initial excitement, the game has encountered significant hurdles, becoming PlayStation's lowest-rated PC port to date with a user review rating of merely 55% on Steam.
Launch Day Performance
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 made its PC debut to a peak of 26,218 concurrent players, a figure that might suggest a successful launch at first glance. However, this number is dwarfed by the game's sales performance on the PlayStation 5, where it sold over 2.5 million copies in the first 24 hours. The disparity between console and PC numbers hints at underlying issues with the PC version.
Performance Woes and User Feedback
The core of the backlash against Spider-Man 2 on PC stems from substantial performance issues. Players have reported a range of problems including:
- Frequent Crashes: Many users experienced the game crashing unexpectedly, often multiple times within short play sessions.
- Stuttering: There have been numerous complaints about frame rate stutters, especially during cutscenes and high-action sequences, which disrupt the gameplay experience significantly.
- Graphical Glitches: From texture loading issues to improper ray tracing implementation, the visual fidelity of the game has not met expectations for many PC gamers.
Steam reviews reflect this discontent, with players like one who noted, "Despite having a high-end GPU and running the latest Nvidia drivers, the game frequently crashes," illustrating the frustration felt by users with even top-tier hardware. The consensus among the community suggests that the game's porting by Nixxes Software, known for their previous successful PC ports, has not lived up to the mark this time around.
The game's system requirements were initially perceived as reasonable, targeting a wide range of hardware capabilities. However, the actual performance did not align with these expectations. Here's a brief rundown of the specs:
- Minimum: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, Intel Core i3-8100, 16GB RAM for 720p at 30 FPS.
- Recommended: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, Intel Core i5-8400, 16GB RAM for 1080p at 60 FPS.
In response to the outcry, Nixxes Software released a hotfix aimed at resolving some of the device hang crashes, particularly those occurring with ray-tracing enabled. While this is a step in the right direction, the community's sentiment remains largely negative, with calls for more comprehensive patches to address the broader range of issues.
Conclusion
For more detailed insights into the performance issues and user reviews, you can check out discussions and reviews on platforms like Steam, Reddit, and various gaming news sites.
