LittleBigPlanet... A new-fashioned type of game with an old-fashioned business model

As anyone who has read my "LittleBigPlanet" review knows, I'm particularly intrigued by how the community will develop. This game is ultimately a platform and it's going to live and die by the quality of the content people upload and how well it's shared and popularized. Yes the graphics are jaw dropping and the pre-made levels in the story mode are pretty good, but anybody who buys the game just for that will end up disappointed. "LittleBigPlanet's" future lies in the community and, just as with most content communities, the vast majority of people will primarily be consumers, not providers.

The obvious model is YouTube, of course. It's a hugely successful platform on which the vast majority of people are consumers, a relatively small number are producers, and a very small minority produce videos that become remotely popular (let's ignore all the pirated stuff). And just as with LittleBigPlanet, YouTube is dependent on tags, user ratings, and sharing mechanisms. Way more people watch YouTube videos because they're e-mailed by a friend or linked/embedded on a blog than go to youtube.com and just browse.

However there's a huge difference between "LittleBigPlanet" and YouTube -- to experience "LittleBigPlanet," you have to buy in. That means purchasing the $60 game, even if you won't be extensively using the level building tools that go into that cost and, if you don't already have one, spending $400 on a Playstation 3. It's kind of the equivalent of saying that if you want to watch a YouTube video, you have to own a Gateway computer and video editing software. Now mind you, this isn't a criticism of Sony (contrary to what some people who read my review thought). It's in the business of selling games and consoles, not enabling people to share content and then trying to figure out how to monetize it later.

The end result, though, is that people have to really want to be a part of the "LittleBigPlanet" community. I would wager many active YouTube producers and consumers initially found the site because they checked out a single video. The barriers to doing so are zilch, so why the hell not?

But if you want to try out an awesome "LittleBigPlanet" level that everyone's talking about? Well, you have to own the game and a PS3. Which means most people won't be able to check it out. Which means it's much, much harder for the "LBP" community to grow organically than YouTube did.

I'm not saying this means "LittleBigPlanet" will be a failure. Not by a long shot. But it has a big barrier to overcome. Of course, there are steps Sony can take to try and ameliorate the problem. An easy one would be to regularly make interesting "LBP" levels available for free via the Playstation Network to tempt every PS3 owner into getting the game. A much harder one technically, I assume, would be to find some way to distribute "LittleBigPlanet" levels via the Web. Maybe translating them into Flash? I can't imagine it would be easy, or cheap, but it's the only way to make "LittleBigPlanet" levels viral the way that popular YouTube videos are.

Right now, Sony has a powerful user-generated platform on its hands, but is stuck with the business model of an old-fashioned videogame. It's not a great match.