File size is a real bugbear when it comes to live-service games, because they consistently balloon as updates and features stack. NetEase is working on remedying how much Marvel Rivals takes up on your hard drive, knocking 40GB off on PC in the latest update.

This will come as part of the Season 9.5 patch, coming on August 7. The mid-season sweep will give all the textures and visuals a lick of paint, and chop the install size down in the process, not just on PC but consoles too.

Sadly, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S players aren't getting quite the same improvement. On consoles, Marvel Rivals is only going down by 15GB. That's the price you pay for convenience, I suppose!

"As the Marvel Rivals universe expands with every season, so does our file size," Guangguang, the creative director of Marvel Rivals, says in the latest dev diary. "While this is the nature of a growing Chronoverse, our tech wizards have been hard at work forging solutions."

He explains that the "texture compression" is a significant contributor to being able to shrink the space the free multiplayer game takes up, and he warns that it mightn't feel like a decrease at first due to how big the update itself is. "Because we are completely repackaging these assets, the initial Season 9.5 update will be larger than usual, but the final install size will be much lighter," he adds.

This comes amid the latest addition to the roster, the gun-wielding The Hood, a New York City criminal and technological genius. Good thing NetEase is making the game more efficient, because he definitely wouldn't stand for such inconsistency.

Marvel Rivals adds a legendarily horny Captain America skin fans say "feels like a gooner mod," but at least it's based on a 34-year-old comic design.

A Spider-Man fan has compared Brand New Day to the Insomniac games, and the similarities are undeniable.

The video, which you can see below, showcases the many, many moves pulled off by Tom Holland's wallcrawler that has its origins in Insomniac's trio of Spider-Man PlayStation titles.

They include Spidey flinging himself from a New York rooftop during the opening act of the fourth Spider-Man MCU movie, propelling himself into an acrobatic flip before swinging through the skyline, a handful of web-based finishers on grunts, and even an eerily similar set-piece as the webhead hurtles towards the ground on a crumbling building.

Director Destin Daniel Cretton has also been vocal about just how much of Insomniac's titles made their way into the finished product of the billion-dollar-grossing megahit.

Cretton told Polygon, "I surrounded myself with people who were obsessive gamers. So a lot of the people in our stunt department loved playing those video games. So they would do screen grabs of their play and bring it in and say like, 'Can we pull this move off?' So that was a great inspiration for things."

That synergy of game design and big-screen spectacle has certainly factored into why Spider-Man: Brand New Day has been such a success.

Already, it holds the record for the biggest US domestic opening at the box office, and is well on its way to a staggering $2 billion total gross worldwide.

The Spider-Man: Brand New Day ending also set up Sadie Sink's Jean Grey for an exciting MCU future, though some are still a little baffled by Ned's 'revelation' in the final scene. Don't be. We have an explainer about that handshake to clear up any confusion.

For more, check out our breakdown of the Spider-Man: Brand New Day post-credits scene. Then, away from Insomniac's undoubted influence, we have more references, winks, and nods listed here in our essential guide to Spider-Man: Brand New Day Easter eggs.