Earlier this week, PlayStation announced that Spider-Man would be exclusive to the PS4 and PS5 version of Marvel’s Avengers in a free update in 2021. It incurred the wrath of gamers everywhere, especially Xbox and PC players, who complained that the move was anti-consumer. This has prompted a response from developer Crystal Dynamics.

Speaking with Newsweek, Crystal Dynamics head Scot Amos confirmed that the reason why Spider-Man is exclusive to the PS4 and PS4 is due to the unique relationship between Marvel and Sony, especially since the latter still owns the cinematic rights to the iconic superhero.

However, he reassured that all of that ultimately doesn’t affect their plans to incorporate crossplay for Marvel’s Avengers.

Amos said:

“Because of Sony’s unique relationship with Marvel and PlayStation, specifically, that gives us an affordance with Spider-Man that we wouldn’t have otherwise.

So that’s something unique because of that relationship, but looking at the future you know we have cross-gen, PS4 to PS5 will work and Xbox to Xbox Series X will work so cross-gen works.

Looking at cross-play as a broader ecosystem is something we want to explore absolutely for the future.

At the moment we have no promises, we have no announcements, but it’s saying ‘hey, this is a connected world we want everybody to play together where they can.’

So when we get to it, and assuming we get to that future, certainly we’ll talk about [cross-play] then, but for the moment it is two separate issues of saying one does not actually influence the other.

We wanted this to be something specific because of the unique relationship and the great partnership between Sony and our collaboration with Marvel that’s awesome and then looking at future consoles and other announcements, we’ll make them when it’s time.

So the beauty of Spider-Man and what Spider-Man represents as a character in this world is, again, it comes back to the relationship with PlayStation and Marvel.

We happen to be ones who can execute and deliver when it comes down to choices of where and what Spider-Man can be, that’s a relationship question that you know PlayStation absolutely has the rights to that as you guys know with Sony’s [movie rights] ownership there and Marvel with Sony saying, ‘hey, this is something we can do, this is something we can do on this platform’ and as creators we have this opportunity that we can make something unique and fun and awesome.

We love the idea of being able to bring this character to the PlayStation players and so as far as everybody goes, dude, we just announced Hawkeye less than a week ago, we have two characters announced within a matter of five days the future is bright.

People will get fixated on one thing as opposed to you’re going to have hundreds of hours of content in years of storylines coming ahead of us and new worlds and regions and new heroes and more stuff we haven’t even announced yet.

But I really do think people look at this and say ‘yeah, okay, we get that we understand the business behind that,’ but in general we’re making this game for everybody.

We want this to be the place you get to play those superhero fantasies out with my Avengers team that’ll continue growing with new characters, characters you haven’t you even guessed yet that are gonna come to this roster down the road and new regions as well, so I am I am very excited for what the future holds for everybody on all platforms.”

It’s unclear at this point whether Xbox and PC players will receive their own exclusive content, but there is apparently a lot of content still planned for the game, so there’s still hope.

Marvel’s Avengers is slated to release for the PS4, Xbox One, PC and Google Stadia on 4 September 2020.