By Nelson Schneider - 07/10/16 at 01:52 PM CT
It was recently announced that all online services for Sony’s incredible, imaginative, and distinctly not Dudebro franchise, ‘LittleBigPlanet,’ are all going to be shuttered at the end of July 2016… in Japan. Naturally, the rest of the world began to worry that Sony was also going to decapitate poor, little Sackboys everywhere else. Sony responded in typical corporate fashion, stating that only “LittleBigPlanet” for the dead PlayStation Portable and “LittleBigPlanet Karting” (which was a fairly terrible karting game all around) will be getting the axe in the wider world, and that there are currently “no plans” to unplug the rest of the series in the West.
Of course, those of us who are familiar with the way Big Evil Corporations in the games industry talk will realize that “no plans” doesn’t actually mean anything, and fans of the flagship “Play. Create. Share.” franchise should be worried regardless of the nation they call home.
This decision to sack the Sack in Japan makes absolutely no sense. As Sony’s first-party IPs become increasingly Westernized and Cinematic, the company also draws further and further away from what their home team audience wants. With its focus on cute characters and nostalgic 2D Platforming, ‘LittleBigPlanet’ seems like it should be the last series to lose official support in Japan. How the hell are ‘Killzone’ and ‘inFamous’ still considered worthwhile and relevant in the Land of the Rising Sun, but ‘LittleBigPlanet’ isn’t?!
This anti-Japan move from Sony follows in the footsteps of an even bigger anti-Japan move by Sony Computer Entertainment, when they decided to move their corporate headquarters from Tokyo, Japan to San Mateo, California at the beginning of this year. Sony’s team of analysts and other pinheads have sited the fact that the Japanese console market is shrinking in the face of a booming mobile game microtransaction engine market as the reason behind leaving the nation that saved gaming in the ‘80s.
Yet it seems that one major unaddressed reason Japanese gamers are changing platforms is because modern consoles don’t offer the types of games they like to play: namely simple, cute, lighthearted titles and high-quality RPGs. This unaddressed shift in the types of games coming out of the modern console industry has left Sony with exactly ONE first-party exclusive IP that would appeal to the shrinking Japanese market – and the company has just decided to kill it off. It’s only a matter of time before Sony’s “no plans” in the rest of the world turn into a systematic Final Solution to the Sackfolk Question.
