Marvel’s Spider-Man has been doing very well in Japan in its first week, or better, its first weekend since it launched on a Friday. The game has sold enough of its initial shipment to be affected by shortages at brick and mortar stores as reported by Media Create.
Now the game is in its second weekend, and we decided to check out the situation with our own eyes. Across Saturday and Sunday, we visited every video game store we knew about in Akihabara, Tokyo, to see if we could find any new copies of the game.
The weekend is when most Japanese gamers tend to go shopping, so it’s a good time to check on a game’s general availability.
The result is that every store we visited did not have a single new copy of the game. We didn’t have any luck at all both on Saturday and Sunday. We checked with the store clerks and they confirmed what we saw on the shelves.
Things were a bit more fluid (but not too much) with pre-owned copies. We found only a few, and even those appeared to evaporate really quickly.
For instance, at the two Trader locations which deal in pre-owned games (the location selling new copies was, of course, sold out), in one store we never managed to find a copy when we visited (but the clerk did mention having had a couple before), while in the other we found a copy on Saturday, and it was gone today.
Incidentally, the Media Create analysis inferred that many customers may be resorting to digital downloads since they can’t find the game on the store shelves, and indeed Marvel’s Spider-Man is at the very top of the sales chart on the Japanese PlayStation Store at the moment.
It’ll be interesting to see Famitsu’s estimates for this period since the popular Japanese magazine is the only source that posts digital sales data from Japan. Unfortunately, it’ll take about a month to see those charts.
It’ll also be intriguing to check out how Marvel’s Spider-Man will fare in next week’s Media Create software chart, and that one will be released on Wednesday.
One thing is for sure: Insomniac Games’ new title appears to have found purchase on the Japanese market, even thanks to the local popularity of the character. While it’s no Monster Hunter World, its success is certainly remarkable for a western game.