Items tagged with 'Sony'
There has been a fair bit of information about the upcoming Sackboy figures and toys in the past month, and some recent photos have confirmed the most awesomerist of things: Toy2R will be producing Qee Sackboy figures.
Qee figures sit alongside Kubrick figures in the mainstream of collectable vinyl figures. But Qee figures are much better than Kubrick figures because, well - they just are.
We hadn’t realised that Toy2R would be producing these until now and that makes these new pictures from the 2009 US ToyFair that extra bit more exciting.
Plus, some additional information is revealed from the photos:
Little Big Planet QEE Series 1 Designer Vinyl (Toy2R)
- One of the biggest video game releases of 2008!
- Diamond Comic Distributors and TOY2R is proud to announce the collaboration between the QEE beand and Sony to offer fans the lovable SACKBOY character from the video game hit Little Big Planet
- This randomly mixed 20 piece assortment features some of the core versions of SACKBOY from the game in retail-friendly blind-box packaging.
- Also includes some special DIY versions allowing fans to create their own version, just like in the game!
- Join the fun and excitement of Little Big Planet as the SACKBOY QEE figure tags along and shows the world your creativity!
- Estimated SRP - $8.99-9.99
- ETA -Q3 2009
A regular Qee figure
As we first thought, these Qee figures will follow the traditional Qee method of randomly mixing the figures so when you buy one, you never quite know which one you’ll be getting. This of course makes them more collectable as you try to get hold of the ones missing from your collection.
At a price point of around $9.99 (Qee’s normally sell in the UK for £6), it will be quite expensive to collect all 30 of them but just a couple of them should be enough to keep most fans happy.
You can see some more of the fantastic Qee collections on the official site, including photos of the recent Simpsons Qees.
Thanks to @Flipyap on Twitter for sending this in (original pics from ActionFigure).
LittleBigPlanet for PSP has been officially confirmed (previously it was only confirmed internally at SCE’s annual briefing). The game was debuted as part of a 2009 lineup unveiling at SCEA’s annual Destination Playstation retail and publisher event in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, which also announced the arrival of Rockband and Assasins Creed for the Sony Handheld. Gamasutra reports...
As for its own titles, a PSP LittleBigPlanet developed with Media Molecule promises new levels specifically created for the platform with the same gameplay, although SCEA didn’t specify whether the PSP edition of the game will interface in any way with the console version
Time to dust off your PSP in anticipation folks!
After the announcement that LittleBigPlanet and Media Molecule were up for a grand total of 10 nominations at The Interactive Achivement Awards taking place in Las Vegas this week, the winners have now been announced and LittleBigPlanet has taken 8 awards home.
Speaking on his Twitter feed, a clearly excited Alex Evans said:
We won! A lot! Go team mm! Thanks academy judges
There’s much to be exicted about too, just take a look at all the awards:
- Overall Game of the Year
- Console Game of the Year
- Family Game of the Year
- Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction
- Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction
- Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering
- Outstanding Character Performance
- Outstanding Innovation in Gaming
Congratulations Media Molecule!
The Interactive Achievement Awards are part of the D.I.C.E summit, which ends today. As part of the summit, Alex is giving a talk about LittleBigPlanet, its user generated content and the game’s design philosophy.
Full details of awards and nominations are available on the official AIAS site.
Following the announcement last week that there will be official Sackboy toys hitting shelves this year, photos from the Toy Industry Association’s Toy Fair 2009, which opened its doors yesterday are starting to come in.
The new photos give us some juicy details on the kinds of toys we’ll be able to get our grubby mits on.
First of all, we’re not sure if last weeks official announcement of 4” figures is still valid but it is now clear that the there will be a 2” figure range coming out in October 2009 from Mezco Toys. So, the same size as popular vinyl toys such as the standard series of Qee, Munny and Kubrick.
The photos show original painted sculpts for the Sackboy prototypes, all of which look super cute. We can’t wait to see their finished versions! There is also a keyring range shown with 4 different, presumably rubber designs.
Sackboy leads the way
Stick ‘em up!
Yay! Keyrings!
Hmmm, does she glow in the dark?!
Yearrgh! Me hearties!
Devil boy too!
So, we’re not quite sure if there are 4” figures (out in Spring) and 2” figures (out in October), or if there are just 2” figures but either way - we’ll be running off to the shops to buy the entire set once they come out.
If the 2” figures sell like Qee’s and Kubricks - you won’t know which one you’re getting until you buy it and open the box! This could get expensive… 
Thanks to Nick for the link! Check out the original photos on GEEKANERD.
To celebrate the release of the Valentine’s mini pack on PSN this week, Mm and Sony have created this romantic wallpaper for use on your PS3. We’ve also resized it a bit to fit on a PC / Mac desktop, aren’t we kind?
The wallpaper will be released officially through the Media Molecule site tomorrow morning, but has been supplied to us and other fansites early through the Sony / Mm fansite program (thanks Sam!) - so get it whilst it’s hot!
Download the wallpaper in 1080p for your PS3, or for your PC / Mac in either Widescreen (1920x1200) or 4:3 (1600x1200), and also a larger version of the poster image we used above. Anyone out there got the skills to make some PS3 icons to go with it?
Update:Mm have now updated their Flickr feed with more of these lovely wallpapers, and they should be on PSN too!
LittleBigPlanet has today been awarded a Platinum Sales status by industry group ELSPA, meaning the title has now sold over 300,000 units in the UK.
300,000 units in the UK alone, for a new IP launching during the busy Christmas period - is really great news. It comes just a few weeks after it was revealed that sales in North American had reached 610,000.
Christmas is always a competitive time of year to launch a game. Recent sales figures for multi-platform titles Mirrors Edge and Dead Space - both also new IP’s, show they’ve shifted just over 1 million units last year. LittleBigPlanet has surged past 1.3 million unique users playing online and is rumoured to be at the 2 million sales mark worldwide. An impressive feat for a new IP, exclusive to a single platform.
Via EDGE Online
Peter Molyneux, head of Lionhead Studios, and ex-boss man of several people from the Mm start up team, has nominated LittleBigPlanet as the most creative innovation, in C&binet’s review of the creative economy in 2008. The report states:
“LittleBigPlanet has outstanding creative vision. It’s from a British start-up studio and is one of the defining titles on Japan’s Sony PS3.”
C&binet - Creativity and Business international network - is a not-for-profit network which links the international creative and commercial communities to inspire new ideas and opportunities, demonstrate the economic power of creativity and help shape the world’s creative economy.
Peter Molyneux is listed as one of C&binet’s ambassadors, along with ex Xbox honcho Jay Allard.
Thanks Gi.biz.
In an interview with GI.biz, Michael Denny, the senior vice president of Sony Worldwide Studios Europe says that Sony needs to adapt to focus more on services and less on product going forward, citing LBP as a clear example. When asked about digital vs. physical game releases,and whether we could see both downloads and discs on day one of a game’s release, he states:
That’s not the important issue for us right now – the actual delivery method. It’s about getting the content right. When we’re talking about the network at the moment it’s also about having network experiences as well. One thing we’re looking at as a big step-change for us is that move from products to services. Going back a couple of years when we launched a game on a disc, you developed it, you tested it, you put it on disc and marketed it, and that was the end of the game. Now, for some games it’s only the start of the game and the service. With LittleBigPlanet’s user-generated content we have to service that correctly, we have to learn what the community needs and we have to make sure we’re providing additional content along the way. So it’s more about the network experience for us.
This month’s Game Developer magazine contains a look back at LittleBigPlanet by the key members of Media Molecule, reflecting on the development process, what they thought went well, and what they thought went… not so well.
The four page article is a fascinating look into the processes, ideas and company culture at Media Molecule, and gives us some detailed insights into their working methods. Below are a few of the points brought up by Siobhan Reddy, the executive producer of LBP. There are a whole bunch more of in the magazine itself, which should be on shelves now, and a digital version can be purchased here for $3.95.
• Pop-it’s accessibility
Pop-it is the name of the in-game editor. There was a time when pop-it was not a single editor but was a set of tools, a paintbrush for painting, a hair dryer gun to blast away material to sculpt, a decoration placement tool, a paint scrubber, and so on.
We had the project greenlighted with pop-it like this, but afterward, it was one of the first areas to evolve. Initially, we didn’t know how versatile the game was going to be or how we would feel about the editor, but as time went on and the conceptbecame more concrete, we became more confident that people would want a more focused editing experience that prioritized functionality over “cuteness.” We quite literally went back to the drawing board. Our new design became a pre-visualization video, which we later tried out in the game.
Making this decision marked a shift in pop-it in that we now expected people to be able to create bigger and more complex things. Between December and May (2007) the pop-it design was worked through until we rested upon the “stamping” concept we finally shipped with. Back then, this was all happening at thesame time that the team was working out what they wanted to make! The switches (basically cause-and-effect nodes that the player can use to construct mechanisms) were the last big feature to be added into creation toolset, and this unlocked the game design enormously. Creating pop-it was a massive job, and one that had constantly moving goal posts. Amazingly, it was primarily coded by one man, Jonny Hopper.
• Molecular structure
A key part of our company culture is to acknowledge that the production plan doesn’t belong to the production team—it belongs to the creator of the work. Each member must make his or her plan visible to everyone else so that we all know what’s going on and can understand how it affects other areas of the game. Once the team grew to be more than 10 people, we started using a structure that we call “molecules,” which was inspired by Valve’s cabal structure and our own experiences. We agreed that our workforce should be organized into small—and ideally cross-pollinated—molecules: pop-it, character, levels, online technology, and player experience, while our audio designer was included in every molecule as well.
Members changed over time, depending on who was working on what. Some people were in two or three molecules at a time, and each molecule works slightly differently, with the only requirement being that their plans need to be visible and shared. Early on we established something we called Friday features. On Fridays, people show the work they created during the week. This allows the whole team to see what’s going on and helps us end each workweek on a high note.
•Settling on servers
We spent a long time talking with Sony about how to proceed with the server technology to support the online components. We had proposed a LittleBigPlanet -specific solution, but it was rejected because, we were told, improving an existing tried-and-tested server would be safer than relying on an entirely new server that would be a perfect match, but would require a lot of testing and not map well to Sony’s process. As a result, a whole section of the game had to be managed and developed collaboratively between Sony and Media Molecule. The launch has been rocky, but that said, the team working on the online components has worked incredibly hard to support the huge amount of online content that has been generated to date.
•Building a studio and making a game at the same time
Our focus was often split between building the game and establishing the studio. We recently conducted some team surveys and learned that there were a lot of things that worked well enough when we were a very small team, but broke down as we became bigger and busier. These issues ranged from the trivial to the serious: employees not knowing who to get direction from, starting meetings on time, making visible the reasons people failed to come to work, office space not being used efficiently, inconsistency in work-life balance—the list could go on!
There is an expectation from the team, and a good one, that every area of the company be the best it can be. We underestimated the amount of support we needed to ship LittleBigPlanet and run the company to its best simultaneously.
The latest sales reports on VGCharts.com for LittleBigPlanet show that most of the world went LBP mad over the Christmas Season, bringing the highest sales for the game since it launched.
We put our stats hat on, and then slipped in to our spreadsheet brassier to take a look at the juicy figures:
A whopping 1.65 million copies sold then, according to VGChartz.com.
But hold the phone a minute - there is a huge 4 weeks worth of information missing there! Stats for the final, big week of Christmas spending are unavailable for Japan, and more importantly, the last three weeks of Christmas in the biggest selling regions: Europe and remaining territories.
We weren’t satisfied with those figures and wanted to estimate the sorts of results that might be coming in over the next coming weeks.
So, the following graph shows missing sales data estimates for Europe and Japan. The estimates are based on the average percentage increase in sales, week on week, from both USA and Japan, with the final week being based on just the USA (as that is the only data available).
This forecast puts LBP well in to the 2 million sales mark, with 2.48 million copies sold worldwide.
OK, ok, ok - so we’re not pretending to be sales experts here - we realise that LBP sales in Europe and remaining territories are unlikely to exceed their first-week sales.
But those figures are based on the percentage increase in sales from both Japan and America over the Christmas period, and Europe should follow a similar pattern.
Even if our estimates are twice as high as the actual figures however, it means LittleBigPlanet has hit the big 2 million mark. Woohoo!
So, do your bit - get out there and tell your friends how damn good this game is!
At £17.99 on Amazon UK or around $52 from U.S retailers, there really is no excuse!
[UPDATE]
Sony just announced (January 8th 2009) that LittleBigPlanet has sold 1.3 million copies worldwide. We’re not sure which set of data to believe, but if Sony’s info is accurate, then it means VGChartz.com are spouting total *******.
MuffinMan71 over on the LittleBigWorkshop forums reports that today he received a notice from Sony informing him that Marvel had taken offence to one of his submitted costumes, and it had subsequently been removed. After some research he notes that the offending costume appeared to be of ‘The Thing’ and that other Marvel based costumes had also been removed from user profiles.
We received a notice from Marvel Entertainment, Inc. (“Marvel”) that materials that you posted on LittleBIGWorkshop.com infringe Marvel’s copyrights. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Little Big Workshop Copyright Policy, we removed and disabled access to these materials.
Please do not post these materials again to LittleBIGWorkshop.com unless you follow the counter-notification procedures outlined in the Copyright Policy and receive permission to repost the materials. The Copyright Policy can be found here. Please do not reply to this e-mail address. Please send all correspondence regarding this notice to infringement@playstation.sony.com or to the address listed in the Copyright Policy and use the reference number contained in the subject line of this e-mail.
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Please be respectful of the rights of content owners and continue to have fun using LittleBIGWorkshop.com.
Whether Marvel will take this further and start asking Sony to moderate costumes in-game instead of just the online galleries is unknown, but if they did try anything, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time. In 2004 Marvel sued NCsoft, publisher of Super Hero based MMORPG, City of Heroes, citing IP Infringement. In 2005 the lawsuit was dismissed.
So how far Marvel will go is unclear, but one thing is… at a time when other companies are explicitly asking for content based on their IP NOT to be moderated, it seems that some companies still don’t get it. Of course It is possible that Marvel are preparing to create some official costumes of their own, as predicted in our top 20 run down, but even then this over-active protection of IP, and direct wrist-slapping to their own fanbase, seems over the top, rather pointless, and far more likely to damage their brands in the long run than it will strengthen them.
Games Industry.biz is reporting that LBP has climbed from 29 to 16 in the UK’s all formats games chart, an increase of 58%.
Just a few days ago LBP soared up, up and beyond 1.1 million sales worldwide, and after winning so many awards this year, including EDGE magazines BEST GAME EVAH 2008 - though can anyone blame those Christmas shoppers storming retailers to stuff LBP in to their Christmas stockings?
Well, we certainly can’t blame them.
