It’s OK Spider-Man, you were once a PS4 exclusive, times are changing

Back in June 2017, a Twitter user asked Insomniac Games a pretty simple question: Will their new one Spiderman Game that only launches on PS4 ever made it to other platforms?

While the original tweet has since been deleted by the user, Insomniac’s response stands:

in case you missed it this was announced earlier today Spidermanonce “permanently exclusive to PS4”, would come to PC in August. And his successor Miles Morales, would join him not long after. womp

I am not posting this to make fun of Insomniac, her social team or her attorneys. I am sure that in 2017 between the industry landscape at that time and the nightmarish legal complexities associated with rights Spidermansurely the game would have looked like it would remain exclusive to PS4 indefinitely.

But times are changing! In 2017 someone worked so closely with Sonyat the peak of their PS4 sales success, would I never could have imagined what the video game industry would be like five years from now (you could argue that they’re kicking ass in the present). What was then a relatively straightforward console battle between Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo has quickly evolved into something infinitely more complicated thanks to subscription services and the ever-growing importance of PC ports.

Five years is all it took for a team to go from being utterly confident that a game would never make it to other platforms, to porting it and announcing its impending release on PC. Which should serve as a focused and timely reminder for all of us that nothing lasts forever, things are always changing in video games and no matter how set in stone things may seem now, you can bet that things will be the same in 2027 be unrecognizable of how today’s landscape would appear… whoever wrote that tweet in 2017.

Spider-Man Remastered coming to PC on August 12th, during Miles Morales will appear sometime in “fall”.