Batman vs Spider-Man: Comics, Continuity & Games

This I all, I think "nerdy pedantry". The reason being that all of these media (or mediums if you prefer) reinvent, re-start, reboot and remix themselves with careless abandon.

The Spider-man films to which you are referring completely and totally ignore the fact that JUST FIVE YEARS AGO Tobey Maguire was poncing about in the Red and Blue spandex.

Before The Dark Knight movie pissed on the memory of Val Kilmer pissing on the memory of Michael Keaton pissing on the memory of Adam West pissing on the memory of Lewis Wilson, the comic of the same name pissed on the memory of Seventies Batman comics pissing on the memory of Silver Age Batman comics pissing on the memory of Golden Age Batman comics.

You are talking about media that are by their own choice ephemeral. Media the multifarious and multitudinous creators of which, in their shortage of ideas and their excess of ideas, rehash and ignore preceding ones in their enthusiasm to promulgate new ones. Media which licence, re-licence, syndicate, and replicate their IP wherever they can. Your citing of Whedon is telling, because he is one of the few auteurs in the industry who has the creative chops and the commercial power to care about his characters and to exercise that care. Most of the rest is aspirational hired hands churning out sausage meat for the Disney or Warner Brothers machines, and when they are told to change the flavour - they do it. Because they have to.

The idea that there is canon is actually balls.

@DoctorDee My point being that it's precisely when things like games stop trying to pander to an established continuity that they work the best. Films are good at this because Hollywood is confident (or arrogant) enough to reinvent/re-interpret properties that were birthed in other mediums. Games, books and comics are much more likely to try to play in the established sandbox, and as a result end up feeling very peripheral with very disposable stories.