A high volume of pre-orders for the collector’s edition of Spider-Man 2 are causing Sony’s Playstation Direct website to have some major issues, frustrating fans.
Pre-orders for the hotly anticipated sequel to Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man opened at 10 a.m. Eastern Time this morning, and fans who were trying to secure copies of the collector’s edition, only available in the U.S. via Playstation Direct, quickly started to flood Twitter with accounts of the website bugging out.
The first wave of issues started to flow in just minutes after the pre-orders went live, with Twitter user @SpaceGangsta_93 describing an experience that would quickly be echoed by many other fans.
“I got to my cart on PlayStation Direct and couldn’t enter card information then was re-directed to the queue :(,” he tweeted. “I hope I don’t miss this because of site traffic :(“
After this, reports of a variety of technical issues with the site started to pop up. Users reported their carts refusing to load, getting locked out of their cart during payment, being unable to even log in to the website, and more issues. One user even caught some video of the site facing a visual glitch on mobile so severe that the video requires a strobe warning. By only 20 minutes in, there were reports of the site appearing to have crashed entirely, leaving people unable to use it at all, though not everyone seemed to have this issue. While many have since been able to acquire the collector’s edition in spite of inconsistent queues and website glitches, some were left still unsure as to if their order had even gone through.
Playstation Direct has developed somewhat of a reputation for issues since it was launched in 2019, with exclusive sales run through the site having seen numerous complaints in the past, particularly when it was used for exclusive restocks of the Playstation 5 during the years of supply shortages it faced after release.
This situation falls into a recent pattern of botched special edition pre-orders from major publishers. Last year, Nintendo had a similar story with the collector’s edition of Xenoblade Chronicles 3, leading their site to fully crash for multiple hours, and Sony’s own God of War: Ragnarok pre-orders frequently shipped incomplete or with mixed-up contents. From an outsider perspective, publishers seem continually unprepared to deal with the logistics of large-volume sales like these.