The Rarest Xbox One Game Probably Isn't What You Expect
The idea of anything considered rare or lost is fascinating to us, particularly as a generation so used to having the world at our fingertips. While coverage of hard-to-find media swings towards spookier, more mysterious topics, there is also a dedicated community of collectors who seek out rare media to acquire it and, in some cases, sell it for a record-breaking amount of money.
When it comes to rare games, we tend to think of obscure titles on older consoles. Most expensive video game rarities were originally released on NES or Atari systems, so rare games for eighth generation consoles such as the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are outliers in themselves.
Moreover, the accolade of rarest Xbox One title is harder to pinpoint than it is for the PlayStation 4, largely thanks to the well-documented cancellation of "Silent Hills" and subsequent removal of "P.T." that came as a consequence of the messy split between Konami and Hideo Kojima. In fact, the collector community surrounding the Xbox One seems to seek out limited controllers, rather than rare game titles.
Less messy, less heartbreaking splits have impacted Xbox One's catalogue, however, with one of the rarest games falling victim to our everyone's least favorite artistic villain: licensing issues.
Why is The Amazing Spider-Man 2 so expensive?
Andrew Garfield's web-shooting wunderkind may have enjoyed something of a renaissance among fans since the release of "Spider-Man: No Way Home," but the game that was released alongside "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" is certainly not included in that revival. It's considered to be one of the worst Spider-Man games, with the Xbox One version receiving only a 46% rating on MetaCritic. Players did not take to the game's overstuffed narrative and glitchy gameplay, a far cry from the highs of "Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales" — which was highly enjoyed by critics – that we're used to experiencing now.
Following this lukewarm reception, the game was struck another blow when Activision's license to publish Spider-Man games expired in the same year, and was subsequently not renewed (via VGC). Consequently, the game had a limited run of physical copies, and has been speculated by players to have likely had little post-launch support. This particularly affected the Xbox One version, which is noted by Digital Foundry to be inferior in performance to the PlayStation 4 version, the physical launch of which had been delayed by two weeks. The digital version of the game was removed from storefronts, meaning the only way to get the game now is through one of the aforementioned physical copies.
The combination of the short lifecycle and relatively small physical print run leaves us with an unexpected rarity, one where a new, unboxed copy can sell for up to hundreds of dollars. Whether it can be considered a hidden gem or not is up for debate.