Spider-Man was Sony's best-earning first-party PS4 game, and it's not even close

Insomniac Games' 2018 release of Spider-Man is by far the best-earning first-party PlayStation 4 game, new leaked data indicates.

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New information unearthed from the recent Insomniac Games data breach reveals key information about Sony's video games business, include sales volume and revenue figures. We won't be directly publishing the tables and data that were leaked as part of this illegal ransomware hack, nor will we be linking to the information. For the purposes of this article, we'll be publishing metrics in a second-hand capacity.

According to the records, Insomniac's Spider-Man game from 2018 stands as the best-earning first-party PlayStation 4 game to date with $827 million net sales revenue generated from 22 million game sales. This information is outdated though. It was accurate as of February-ish 2022, which takes place during Sony's Q4 Fiscal Year 2021 period. It's likely that the values are higher now.

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It's also worth mentioning that Marvel takes a percentage of net sales as a royalty, so Insomniac's and Sony's takes are lower than this value.

In 2020, Sony had announced that the original Spider-Man sold 20 million copies (this was before the PS5 re-release). It was revealed that as of June 2022, both Spider-Man 2018 and the 2020 release of Miles Morales had sold a combined 33 million copies.

Spider-Man 2, which released in October 2023, sold 5 million copies in its first 11 days (including pre-orders).

Based on the leaked data, God of War was in second place during this timeframe, followed up by Uncharted 4, Horizon Zero Dawn, and The Last of Us Part II.

In fact, based on the time period that this data was collected, the Last of Us duology on PS4 (Parts I & II) had generated only $22 million more in net sales revenue than the single 2018 Spider-Man game (the big difference here is that Sony/Naughty Dog keep all of the revenues for Last of Us, and Sony/Insomniac instead must pay Marvel a % royalty fee for Spider-Man).