Sony Looks to Spider-Man to Boost PlayStation 5 Console Sales
To meet its sky-high sales forecasts for the PlayStation 5 this year, Sony Group Corp. will look for help from a superhero.
On Thursday, Sony will release Marvel's Spider-Man 2, its biggest game of the year and one of the most important moments to date for the PS5, which launched in November 2020. During its first two years on the market, Covid-related supply shortages made the PS5 difficult to purchase, and Sony decided to release several lavish PS5 games, such as Horizon Forbidden West and God of War Ragnarok, on the PlayStation 4 as well — potentially undermining some players' urgency to upgrade. So far, the PS5 has sold around 40 million units, lagging behind the sales of its predecessor.
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This fiscal year, with the supply chain issues resolved, Sony is hoping to sell 25 million PS5s and last week unveiled slimmer new models, aiming to juice purchases over the holiday season. The arrival of Spider-Man 2, one of the first games to be released exclusively on PS5, will also help. The game will be promoted in a sales bundle with the console.
Spider-Man 2, developed by Sony-owned Insomniac Games, is the third installment in the series, following 2018's Spider-Man and 2020's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. The first two games have sold more than 33 million copies, making Spider-Man one of the PlayStation's most lucrative franchises, and expectations for the new iteration are running high.
Recent PlayStation games have cost more than $200 million to make, according to Lewis Ward, a research director at the International Data Corp. Ward said the new superhero sequel “may be in that same range.”
“Spider-Man 2 has to be a system seller,” he said.
In the new game, an alien parasite called the
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