Marvel's Avengers, Marvel's Spider-Man, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, are four of the biggest and most successful Marvel games to come out in recent years. Two of the aforementioned titles are exclusive to the PS4, but we'd be lying if we didn't say that most think all of them are not available on Xbox.
Having said that, there was actually a time when Xbox could have had a shot at developing Marvel games as early as Sony did.
Executive vice president and head of Marvel Games, Jay Ong, revealed in last year's book, The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 2: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and the Billion-Dollar Battle to Shape Modern Gaming, that Marvel reached out to Sony and Microsoft in 2014 about the possibility of making AAA titles based on existing Marvel IPs. Unfortunately, as per Ong, Microsoft "passed" because the company wanted to "focus on their own IP" at the time.
On the other hand, Sony said yes and the rest is history.
Sony's success with Marvel games is mostly due to the overwhelming success of the 2018 title, Marvel's Spider-Man. Insomniac Games' first non-original IP launch was a huge hit as soon as it came out. At the moment, Marvel's Spider-Man is the third-best-selling game on the PS4 with 13.2 million units sold. On top of this, a re-release for the PS5 and a spin-off in 2020, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, adds nearly as much to this amount, giving the PS-exclusive pair of titles a total sales figure of close to 30 million units.
