Friday, November 21, 2008

So your sackboy wants to go to art school...

So there's a lot of buzz right now about Little Big Planet hasn't met sales expectations and (gasp) might not be the silver bullet savior of Sony's undernourished ps3. It seems like every place I go for gaming news, I'm finding articles about the situation. Predictably, almost everything being written is sheer stupidity. No one seems to have the foggiest idea why LBP isn't blowing up the charts. Sigh. Let me explain... since apparently I need to.

Since arriving on the scene in 1993, Sony has done virtually everything in its power to be the anti-Nintendo. They sell slick. They sell cool. They sell high tech 14-29 year old male demographic gaming. Playstations are where games like Grand Theft Auto, SOCOM, and Gran Turismo live. ok, stay with me, I'll try to keep this simple.

Whether you call the ps3 a failure or a very late bloomer (this quiz accepts either), it's easy to see that it's in last place in this generation of systems. There just aren't that many out there. The people that do have them, have them for Metal Gear Solid 4, Resistance: Fall of Man, and a handful of shooting/driving games. They're mostly Sony diehards. See above.

The ps3 has a small choir and Little Big Planet wasn't designed to preach to it.

That's it. LBP may be a masterpiece, but it's a masterpiece on a third place, testosterone-driven console. A console that's not particularly friendly to casual gamers. LBP is a killer app, not a fairy godmother with an army of time machines.

Now please stop pestering the LBP dreamscape with your bizarre mathematical expectations.



In a broader sense, it's wrong to even treat LBP like a game. It's not a game. It's a game system. The first truly functional game system in the pixel driven world. Comparing its sales figures to Legos or Dungeons and Dragons would be more accurate.