We all had a feeling Marvel's Spider-Man sold well, but did you know it apparently made a whopping $3.8 billion?
According to the LinkedIn profile of Kevin Kimball, a former global group marketing manager at PlayStation, he oversaw the efforts for Spider-Man "achieving a 971% sales surge in its first year, selling over 20M units globally and generating $3.8B in revenue." This was first highlighted on Twitter by bogorad222.
The maths on this is seems a little fishy, as 20 million units shipped at $70 only adds up to $1.4 billion. That's still a staggering amount, but less than half what Kimball claims. The figure could also include DLC sales which could bump the revenue up substantially, though it's not clear by how much. We've reached out to Kimball for clarification.
Either way, this is an astonishing amount of money for a single game to bring in on just one console. The game launched in 2018 for PS4, was then remastered for PS5 in 2020, and it finally came to PC in 2022. Kimball wasn't at PlayStation by the time of the PS5 or PC versions, so these figures probably only relate to the original PS4 version of the game.
Unfortunately, even a massive hit like this doesn't guarantee job security, as Sony laid off 900 people in February this year, including staff at Marvel's Spider-Man developer Insomniac Games, as well as Guerrilla Games and Naughty Dog.
If you're keen to play more bangers, check out our list of the best games of 2024 so far.
