Spider-Man 2 and The Xbox One Launch

On the 17^th October 2013 it was announced that the launch of Spider-Man 2 on the Xbox One had been postponed. There were no reasons given. The game is still set to land on pretty much every format on the 2^nd of May, but those who were waiting for an Xbox One release were out of luck.

Sadly, there is very little to speculate upon here. I have read a couple of rumours online. Some people claim that the lack of an Xbox One launch was down to the fact that the game was far too difficult to port to the format. This is an argument which makes no real sense to be. The game is being launched on the Wii U after all. I am willing to wager that it is a lot more difficult to port games to the Wii U than it is to any of the other consoles on the market.

The second reason given online was the fact that the publishers figured that a launch on the Xbox One simply would not be viable due to the lack of sales on the console. To be honest, this was another thing that made absolutely no sense to me. The game has been announced for a LONG time. It is only a couple of weeks before the launch of the game that it was canned. The marketing machine had already begun. People were aware that it was coming out on the console. It was then pulled. When it comes to multi-platform marketing advertisements tend to include all formats. It would have been next-to-no extra cash (in the grand scheme of things) to target the Xbox One market. This therefore can’t be the reason either.

So, what is the reason? I have absolutely no idea. I seriously doubt anybody who is not ‘in the know’ does either. Crazy! It is very rare that games are canned so close to launch without a reason being given.

On the 20^th of April it was announced that the game may still be heading to the Xbox One. It was announced by Activision that if the game did come to the platform then it may be published by Microsoft, or at least it would be joint-partnership.

This is quite a strange turn of events to be honest. As you may know, the Spider-Man movie is out this week (today in fact!) which means that by the time the launch of the Xbox One version rolls around (if it ever does) the majority of people who have seen the movie and want to play the game will probably end up snapping it up on one of the other consoles. If it does end up being launched on the Xbox One then I predict that the sales are going to be quite low. There will be no real marketing machine behind the game and thus very few people will actually know about its launch. I predict a failure.