LittleBigPlanet and the holiday rush

There's been a lot made of LittleBigPlanet's sales numbers lately.  LBP was supposed to be a huge release for the PS3, the trademark hit of the season that would not only sell a lot of PS3s but also further Sony's gaming brand.  Leading up to the launch of LBP the marketing blitz (beginning at E3) hinted at the potential for Sackboy, LBP's main character, to take the helm as the PS3's system mascot.  Now the November NPD sales numbers have been released and it seems that sales are rather dismal.  LBP was outperformed by SOCOM: Confrontation on the PS3, slipping out of the top 10 completely with only around 200k units sold.  So...what happened?

A few things.  First the ones that aren't as noticeable.  I think that LittleBigPlanet should have been released a month or two earlier.  Obviously nothing can be done about a development cycle, and it's optimal for a developer to hold onto their product until it's absolutely ready to go out to the public, but around the game's release date it seemed a lot of the hype died down really fast.  In August and September there was a ton of buzz because the media had their hands on the beta and the game was showing a ton of potential.  In the weeks leading up to October 27th (LBP's North American release date) there seemed to be a decent amount of buzz from gamers.  Then a week after the game came out, poof, the buzz died.

There has been some claims that this happened because the online service backing LittleBigPlanet didn't work straight out of the gate.  As with most popular game launches there was a huge amount of stress on the game's servers, and with LBP the case was doubled as a lot of the online functionality has to do with uploading user-created content so other users can then download and try out what you make.  Another possible reason for the slow sales could be that people got distracted.  I know this happened to me despite having purchased the game.  When I got LBP I played it for about a week, and then Fallout 3 came out.  Because Fallout 3 was a mastodon of a game including hours and hours of story-based campaign gameplay, I put LBP on the back burner assuming I'd come back to it when I had time.  I justified this move at the time because there really isn't a story holding LBP together, and it's the perfect game to pop in and play every now and then without having to dedicate large amounts of time to it in succession to get through.  Perhaps people wanted to pass up on LBP so they could get through the more traditional campaign-based games first?  If that's the case then we're facing a dilemma.

The question is, why are there still so many damn games released from October to December every year?  Obviously the holiday rush is important, but I think the number of games coming out quickly reaches a saturation point, especially considering the crappy economic situation we're in.  There have been around 10 purchase-worthy games released between October and December of this year:

1. LittleBigPlanet
2. Fallout 3
3. Gears of War 2
4. Call of Duty: World at War
5. Mirror's Edge
6. Resistance 2
7. Far Cry 2
8. Prince of Persia
9. World at Warcraft : Wrath of the Liche King
10. Left 4 Dead

That's over $600 worth of games alone, and I'm leaving out biggies like Guitar Hero World Tour, Wii Music, portable games (PSP or DS), and some others I'm sure.  A lot of people don't have $600 to spend paying bills let alone buying games, so gamers have to pick and choose.  If however, game studios and developers finally realized that gamers don't just play games during the last quarter of the year, but year-round, this problem could be easily remedied.  For instance had LittleBigPlanet come out next March I'm positive it would have sold much better.  In March chances are good that there won't be nearly as many games to play because that's typically the beginning of the Spring to Summer drought.  Because of this people would be more willing to jump into a game that has a ton of content considering the ability to create, share and play content in LBP.  When you're 1 of 3 big games coming out you're going to sell more than when you're 1 of 15.

There is hope, however.  We have seen some big games slip to different times of the year - Bioshock comes to mind most memorably.  There's hope for LBP too.  What I think will happen is that a lot of late adopters will end up picking LBP up through the middle of next year when they don't have much to play and when they're ready and willing to spend time creating and downloading levels.  By that time I'm sure a lot of the online issues will have been resolved as well.  Anyways, sorry for the extremely long post.  This is just something I kind of wanted to get off my chest.  Let me also say before wrapping it up that LittleBigPlanet is an awesome game despite the disappointing sales so far.  It's a game that I can't wait to jump back into when I make it through some of the more linear games I'm working on right now.  If you own a PS3 you should definitely give it a shot.

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