It turns out Spider-Man will be in Square-Enix’s upcoming Marvel’s Avengers game—but only for PlayStation owners. The character will be a free Sony exclusive for the superhero game in 2021, the PlayStation blog announced today.
PlayStation, of course, is also the exclusive home of Spider-Man’s own solo adventure, Marvel’s Spider-Man, which is getting a standalone spinoff this year. No doubt that business arrangement—combined with the fact that Sony still owns the film rights to the character—has something to do with Ol’ Webhead only swinging into the PlayStation version of Marvel’s Avengers.
Obviously a lot of people aren’t too pleased by this news. Xbox fans hoping to play as Spidey are out of luck, unless they want to buy an entirely new console just to play as one character. Perhaps Xbox will have its own unique character to balance it out, or perhaps Sony’s just going to have a leg up with this game.
Not to editorialize, but as a guy whose formative years of reading comics were in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I’m totally okay without Spider-Man being a part of the Avengers. A big part of his character back then was that, although he was friendly with literally every single superhero in the Marvel Universe, he wasn’t a joiner. Yeah, he’d help out the Avengers, and the Fantastic Four were basically like family to him, but he’d never officially join them. It both gave his character a unique element and also helped keep the spotlight on characters that weren’t as popular in those teams—characters like Captain America, Thor and Iron Man, who are now viewed as top tier Marvel characters, but weren’t nearly as popular as Spider-Man or the X-Men at the time. So hey, an Avengers without Spider-Man isn’t just okay with me, but actually preferable. But that’s just one old man’s opinion.