Connect with us

GAMING

Spider-Man 2 Headlined Extra as Nacon Faced Insolvency

PlayStation Plus Extra used Spider-Man 2 as the February billboard while two Nacon games arrived eight days before the publisher’s insolvency filing.

Published

on

PlayStation Plus Extra added Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on February 17, 2026, more than two years after Insomniac Games launched it on PS5. Eight days later, Nacon, publisher of two other games in that same drop, told a French court its assets could not cover its debts.

Rhys Elliott at Alinea Analytics later put Extra’s Spider-Man 2 haul at 4.3 million new players, the second-largest PlayStation Plus intake Alinea logged for 2026. The poster game did huge work. The rest of the month did a different job.

The Poster Game Was Already Two Years Old

Adam Michel, director of content acquisition and operations at Sony Interactive Entertainment, posted the February Game Catalog lineup on February 12. Extra and Premium members could download the games from February 17. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 sat first, PS5 only, billed as a chance to swap between Peter Parker and Miles Morales across an expanded New York.

Insomniac had shipped that sequel on October 20, 2023. By August 2026 Elliott’s desk had it at 18.2 million copies sold, with more than 92 percent of those copies on PS5, and Alinea’s September 8 note put lifetime revenue near $1.3 billion. Extra was not introducing a secret. It was opening the door for people who had waited.

Sony spent the last week of February pointing Extra members at the same game again. The official PlayStation account treated the catalog as a Spider-Man 2 event, and the replies followed that cue. Insomniac got the credit. The other eight Extra titles got a line each on the blog and almost no air after that.

Nacon Landed Two Games on Extra

Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown joined on PS5. Rugby 25 joined on PS5 and PS4. Both carry Nacon’s name. KT Racing built the racer, a Hong Kong open-world reboot that Michel’s post said arrived 13 years after Test Drive Unlimited 2 and lists more than 30 car makers, from 1960s daily drivers to hypercars, split between two clans called the Streets and the Sharps.

Solar Crown launched on September 12, 2024, 17 months before Extra. Metacritic logged a 53 from 29 critic reviews: one positive, 19 mixed, nine negative. Users sat at 3.9 from 162 ratings. Rugby 25, from Nacon’s Big Ant Studios subsidiary, had its full console launch on February 13, 2025, just over a year before Extra picked it up.

THE FEBRUARY EXTRA CATALOG

Game Platforms Who shipped it
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 PS5 Insomniac / Sony
Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown PS5 KT Racing / Nacon
Rugby 25 PS5, PS4 Big Ant / Nacon
Neva PS5, PS4 Studio behind Gris
Season: A Letter to the Future PS5, PS4 Catalog, Extra
Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin PS4 Capcom
Monster Hunter Stories PS4 Capcom
Venba PS5 Catalog, Extra
Echoes of the End: Enhanced Edition PS5 Catalog, Extra
Disney Pixar Wall-E PS5, PS4 Premium classic, originally PS2

Nine of those titles sat on Extra. Wall-E was the only extra game Premium members received beyond that catalog. Regional storefronts can still differ, which Michel flagged at the bottom of the post.

Eight Days Later Came the Court Filing

On February 20, 2026, Nacon said the situation at majority shareholder Bigben Interactive, which had missed a partial bond repayment after its banks refused a drawdown, was hitting Nacon’s own operations. Staff representatives were told on February 24. On February 25 the publisher filed for insolvency with the court in Lille and asked for judicial reorganization.

To date, the Company reports that its available assets do not allow it to meet its due liabilities. In this context, the Company will, as of today, file for insolvency with the Court and request the opening of judicial reorganization proceedings.

Nacon, February 25, 2026 statement

The filing does not say Extra caused the cash hole. It does fix the calendar. Solar Crown and Rugby 25 became Extra games on February 17. The publisher of both told a court eight days later that it could not pay what it owed. Sony’s catalog post never mentioned Nacon’s finances, and there is no public sign Sony timed the slots to the court date. The dates still sit eight days apart.

NACON’S WEEK IN FEBRUARY

  1. February 17, 2026: Solar Crown and Rugby 25 join the Extra catalog beside Spider-Man 2.
  2. February 20, 2026: Nacon says Bigben’s missed bond repayment is affecting its operations.
  3. February 24, 2026: Employee representative groups are informed of the next step.
  4. February 25, 2026: Nacon files for insolvency and asks the Lille court to open reorganization, a process that can freeze debts for up to 18 months.

KT Racing kept supporting Solar Crown after that week. The Extra window still read, from outside, like a last catalog payday for a publisher that had already run out of road.

The Catalog Sony Did Not Advertise

Michel’s opening sentence named four games: Spider-Man 2, Solar Crown, Neva, and Season: A Letter to the Future. The other five Extra titles sat lower on the page. That lower block is closer to what Extra is for, a stack of games most subscribers would not have bought at full price.

GAMES EXTRA DID NOT PUT ON THE POSTER

  • Neva: An action adventure from the studio behind Gris, following Alba and a wolf cub through a decaying world; it won Games for Impact at The Game Awards 2024.
  • Season: A Letter to the Future: A bicycle road trip about recording a culture before a coming wash-out, on PS5 and PS4.
  • Monster Hunter Stories and Stories 2: Capcom’s turn-based rider pair, both PS4, landing 24 days before Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection launched on March 13, 2026.
  • Venba: A cooking story about an Indian mother who moves to Canada in the 1980s and rebuilds a damaged recipe book, PS5 only.
  • Echoes of the End: Enhanced Edition: A PS5 fantasy about Ryn, a vestige with old magic, set across glaciers and volcanic ruins styled after Iceland.

The Monster Hunter pairing had a clock on it. Extra gave anyone who had skipped the spin-offs a 24-day cram before Stories 3. Neva and Venba are the opposite kind of Extra game: short, specific, easy to ignore in a month with a Marvel sequel on the thumbnail. They are also the games Extra can actually change the audience for, because they never had Spider-Man 2’s install base.

Premium’s Extra Game Was a PS2 Port

Premium members paid for the same Extra catalog, then received one classic on top. Disney Pixar Wall-E, first released on PlayStation 2 and based on the 2008 film, follows the last working trash robot on a ruined Earth and a trip across space after Eve arrives. The solo campaign is a puzzle adventure. Up to four players can run mini-games, from timed space races to battles.

That is the whole Premium-only addition for February. Michel’s post spends more words on Wall-E’s plot than on why a 2008 licensed platformer was the month’s classic. Extra did the work. Premium added a PS2 movie game and a reminder, in the footnote, that lineups can differ by region.

How Many New Players Did Extra Add?

Alinea’s September 8 note ranked 2026 PlayStation Plus intakes and put Spider-Man 2 second, with 4.3 million new Extra players after the February catalog add. The first days produced a spike. After that, Alinea saw about 100,000 new Extra players a week, with another bump when the Spider-Man film Brand New Day reached cinemas.

EXTRA’S SPIDER-MAN 2 TALLY

  • New Extra players: 4.3 million after the February catalog add, per Alinea on September 8, 2026.
  • After the spike: About 100,000 new Extra players a week until the film window lifted the line again.
  • Film window Extra: 274,000 people started the game through Extra during the Brand New Day burst, a separate slice inside the larger 4.3 million.
  • Lifetime copies: 18.2 million by August 2026, with more than 92 percent on PS5, and about $1.3 billion across platforms in Alinea’s September 8 figure.

Those 4.3 million people are why the “everyone already owns it” knock does not hold. Millions of Extra members had not played the sequel. Sony still chose a finished first-party hit as the public face of a month that also carried two Nacon games and a PS2 licensed classic. The Extra thread around Sony’s own promo treated that choice as an Insomniac victory lap.

Solar Crown Still Gets New Seasons

KT Racing did not fold the racer when Nacon went to court. A September 1, 2026 Solar Club letter set Season 7 of Solar Crown to arrive the next day, with a mid-season update dated for October 28. Extra had already moved on to later monthly catalogs by then. The racing game Nacon needed Extra to move was still getting cars and patch notes.

Extra is also the tier subscribers point to when the cheaper plan gets more expensive. After Sony’s 10% Essential price increase in May 2026, the catalog is the remaining argument for paying for Extra. February is what that argument looked like in practice: a 2023 blockbuster that pulled 4.3 million new Extra players, two Nacon games that arrived eight days before an insolvency filing, and a Premium classic that began on PS2.

Michel’s post promised swinging, racing, a wolf cub, and a bicycle trip. Extra delivered all of that on February 17. The month’s receipts, counted months later, belong to Spider-Man 2. The calendar around those receipts still includes Nacon’s court date.

Harry runs THUNDER TIGER as its editor, owning the title outright and writing across every section on it. Ten years in journalism sit behind that, a reporter's stretch followed by an editor's, and the habits show in what he reads before he writes: the filing rather than the results announcement, the judgment rather than a summary of it, the electoral authority's own count, the safety notice as the regulator issued it, the paper with its sample size and its stated limitations, the governing body's official record, the specification sheet, the release notes. Figures get checked against whatever produced them, then checked again for the base they were calculated from. He treats the corrections policy as part of the reporting rather than an apology for it: an error is repaired inside the article with a dated note saying what changed, and anything still unconfirmed is labelled unverified instead of being smoothed into fact. His readers are international and his sections run from news, business, technology and science through sports, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, auto and gaming. Readers can reach him at support@thundertiger-europe.com.

Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Trending