LittleBigPlanet: Download First, Disc Later
After the Sony keynote at the GDC, Attack of the Show was able to conduct a followup interview with Phil Harrison. The interview aired on their podcast and in it Harrison confirmed the initial statements that Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet will be a downloaded game first, followed by a disc release sometime after that. He mentioned that they plan to take the best levels generated by the online community and pack it into the BD version of the game. It’s not a surprise that the developers and/or the publisher will have the rights to all of the user-created content, but what is a surprise is that they want to include user-generated content at all.
I can see value in a BD version of the game including gigs upon gigs of user-created levels, but how many levels do you really want on disc to fiddle around with? Will you get any custom objects or assets those levels used to put in your own levels? That alone could be worth it for the hardcore creative people. They’d play a level, see a clever device, and try to copy it wholesale into their own level and tweak it from there. It all depends on what they allow and how flexible the tools are.
It also goes without saying that there will have to be strict review of what gets put on the disc to avoid copyright infringement. The whole business of uploading your own images looks like something that will create a lot of headaches for the review team. To me, that alone would be reason enough to scuttle the idea of a disc. While copyright owners can issue takedown notices for violations in specific levels, you can’t just erase something off of a disc. We shall see.
Links:
The Sony Keynote Attack of the Show podcast.
The Attack of the Show podcast.
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