Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered is finally available as a standalone title on the PS5, which probably sounds utterly bizarre to you if you haven’t been following the game's strange saga. Early adopters of the PS5 may remember that the remastered version of Spider-Man came bundled with Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales when it launched in late 2020. Until this week, that’s been the only way to get your hands on the remaster. Even when Spider-Man Remastered launched on PC last year, PS5 players still had no way to get it other than to buy the deluxe edition of Miles Morales - and as my colleague Andrew King points out, owners of the standard version of Miles Morales couldn’t get it at all.
Over two years later, Marvel’s Spider Man Remastered is finally available as a separate, standalone purchase, and I highly recommend playing it. Whether you missed it back in 2018 and you’re trying to get caught up before Spider-Man 2 later this year, or you played the original and you’re ready to replay it in all of its next-gen glory, you’re going to have a great time. Spider-Man Remastered is one of the better remasters out there, and the visual improvements it makes over the original are significant. This is still one of the best games you can play on the PS5, but I have an important warning to issue. Don’t buy the digital version of Spider-Man Remastered. Unless money means nothing to you, there are much cheaper ways to get this game.
Sony is charging $50 for Spider-Man Remastered. This is in parity with the PC version, where you don’t have the option of bundling it with Miles Morales (MM came out several months after Spider-Man Remastered on PC). If you haven’t played either one, you’re way better off buying the bundle with the Miles Morales Deluxe Edition for $70. Miles Morales is much shorter than Spider-Man, but it’s well worth the extra $20. In fact, I prefer it over the original. If you decide to wait and buy Miles Morales separately after seeing if you even like Spider-Man enough to play the sequel, it’s going to cost you another $50. You’ll save $30 buying them together digitally, and I promise you won’t regret it.
Let’s say you already own the standard version of Miles Morales, or, for whatever reason, you’re definitely not interested in the sequel. You still shouldn’t buy the digital version of Spider-Man Remastered. PlayStation is offering a $10 upgrade if you own the PS4 version of Spider-Man, and considering the game is now five years old on a last-gen console, you can save a ton of money just by buying a physical copy and paying the upgrade fee. If you live in the states, GameStop has pre-owned copies of Spider-Man for $15. That’s $25 total with the upgrade fee, half the price of what Sony is asking for the digital version.
I’ve used this trick plenty of times before. The digital version of Death Stranding Director’s Cut is $50 on the PlayStation store, but you can easily find a physical copy of the base game for $10 and pay a $10 upgrade fee. I was incensed when Horizon Forbidden West launched for $70 on PS5, while the PS4 version was only $60. Thanks to the free upgrade, both games were identical on the PS5, yet once cost $10 for no reason.
Sony is way overcharging for digital games and hoping that its players are too stupid to notice. There are pros and cons to both physical and digital games, but it’s impossible to justify a digital version costing double the price of the physical one. Spider-Man Remastered shouldn’t be more than $30 all these years later, and anyone that pays the full $50 for it is letting themselves get scammed by Sony. Save some hard-earned cash if you’re going to pick up Spider-Man Remastered, and spread the word.