In a panel discussion between former Sony executive Phil Harrison and Media Molecule staff, it was revealed that the team was at one point pushed to make LittleBigPlanet into more of an open platform with no financial barrier to entry.
“[Phil] said it should be free to play, it should have a new business model, it should be downloadable,” said Media Molecule technical director Alex Evans. “It should do DLC, it should do user-generated content. Phil was basically raising the bar on what we were pitching.”
“The challenge I gave the team was to make it possible for LBP to be a free to play downloadable service, not a product, and with a mechanism for monetizing user generated content that would allow the best creators to be to rewarded in some way for their for the innovation,” explained Harrison in a follow-up with GamesIndustry.
“There were many good reasons why that didn’t happen with LBP, but clearly the seeds have certainly been sown and it will be fascinating to see how the console platforms take on that challenge in future.”
LBP was almost a downloadable, free-to-play title [GamesIndustry.biz]
