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makingmusic476 on 29 January 2010
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Seece said:
makingmusic476 said:
Seece said:
Hypocrit, it's exactly the same, except Sony give the money before hand rather than after.

It's not the same at all.  Sony had a critical role in the development of titles like LBP.  They paid for development and had their own producers and developers working on the game.  Sony Cambridge and other studios assisted Media Molecule significantly with engine technology and Phil Harrison himself pushed the studio in the direction of user generated content.  Similarly, Sony Japan had a helping hand in the creation of Demon's Souls, from improving From Software's engine to SCEJ producers directly molding the shape of the game.  Without SCE's money and people, these games would not be what they are.

This method of pursuing exclusive titles fosters creativity and development, unlike merely buying exlcusivity with a check, which does nothing more than make a formerly multiplat game exclusive for a few months.  One method puts new and better titles in the hands of gamers, while the other takes them away.  Or keeps them away for a few months.

If you're going to call them hypocrites, do it for something like Ghostbusters or the Joker challenge maps in Batman.  It's a dick move tossing around a few bucks just to keep people from having access to those.

Just a way of sugar coating it, The game's Microsoft shell out for don't need help, they're capable of making the game without Microsoft's team.

So basically

Sony helps dev's that can't make a brilliant game by putting money and people into it, and Microsoft help those that can make a decent game by putting ... just money into it.

 

When late down the road they all end up on PS3 anyway, The PS3 exclusives however don't. So they're the ones denieing them access.

Without Sony, LBP and Demon's Souls would be nothing like they currently are.

Without Microsoft, Bioshock and others would probably be the exact same as what they currently are, but available to more people from day one.

See the difference?

To focus on LBP specifically, without Sony the game probably would've never progressed much further past this stage:

I doubt any other publisher would've taken such an unusual idea and turned it into a high budget AAA project.

Phil Harrison specifically had a significant impact on the game's creation:

Former Sony Worldwide Studios exec Phil Harrison's influence at the early stages of LittleBigPlanet was "completely key and pivotal" says Alex Evans.

"Obviously that then transitioned into Sony, and especially the team at Liverpool, and Michael Denny - I don't want to downplay their roles as well. But certainly with Phil, at the very beginning, the amazing thing was that he got it," the Media Molecule co-founder told GamesIndustry.biz.

Evans said the team struggled to describe the game in words before they had anything to show, and didn't expect a publisher to really get it - let alone champion it.

"But the interesting thing with Phil was that when we pitched to him, we actually played down what became the Game 3.0 things that he talked about.

"We pitched much more of a platform game, the physics and so on, and he was very instrumental in telling us to think about what it would mean to have user-generated content - to think about what that means for the community."

Evans said Harrison pushed them - correctly - towards what they most wanted to do, with great clarity and perspective.

"I think that was his influence on the game early on, and I think it was hugely useful to have that degree of focus in the right place, and the right time."