2023 always had scope to be a strange one for Sony. For one, PlayStation entered the year with relatively few first-party exclusives on the books – in comparison to previous years, at least; certainly since the introduction of PS5 in 2020 – with its biggest rival Microsoft gearing up to launch Starfield, easily one of the most-anticipated games of recent times, as an Xbox console exclusive.
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was the obvious challenger here from a commercial and critical perspective, and while it's difficult to compare the two directly (we'll dig into that further down the page), Insomniac Games' second crack at the red-suited superhero quickly became the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game over a 24-hour period, selling more than 2.5 million copies in a single day.
