14 DAY TRIAL // LittleBigPlanet is one of the most innovative games that have appeared this holiday season. It won over quite a few people with its interesting puzzles but didn't really get off to a great start in terms of sales, as Media Molecule, its developer, and Sony, its publisher, hoped it would.
However, as the holiday season is in full swing, hopes are high, especially because new content is added to the game everyday. Whether these new additions consist of levels created by average players using the contents of the game, or of costumes and new content made by Media Molecule, the title will get better as time goes by.
But the small puzzle platformer has had a few problems, especially because the moderation policies of the user-created levels were pretty hard on the people who created new stages for the game, which were tributes to classic games such as Mario. These levels were permanently deleted by the moderators, as the stages infringed the copyright on said IPs (Intellectual Properties) but, as an effort to prevent user backlash, Sony and Media Molecule have both said that users will be given advice by moderators in order to prevent their levels from being deleted.
Now, in a recent interview with IGN, Alex Evans, an executive for Media Molecule, revealed that a few companies were more than happy to have their IPs in LittleBigPlanet. He went on to say that they were really pleased with how their own brand was represented in the levels created by the average users and said that such publicity was more than welcomed.
“[There was a big] number of IP owners who came up to us and said please whitelist us – we'll never ever ask you to pull infringing stuff. I can't say who that is, but those two things really shocked me, I think it shocked the IP holders, who were like, hang on, my IP's being represented and it's being represented really well. The IP holders have to have last say over the representation of their brand, and that's fair enough, so we've always got to have a method for people misusing a brand, but what's been really lovely is how well represented so many brands are.”
It quite nice to hear that at least some IPs can be used in the levels for LittleBigPlanet. Copyright infringement is always a pretty complicated thing but it seems that Media Molecule is starting to take the right steps in order to prevent it and not cause a backlash among users against the company or the game itself.