what sony did to littlebigplanet is deeply deeply fucking evil. even from the outside looking in, as someone who couldn't ever get into it, i'm appalled. it makes even owning any of their products feel dirty to me
this really cements it to me that out of all the big players in the video game industry, sony values the medium as art the absolute least. back when playstation was first getting off the ground they supported so many distinct and unique games, but once they found a breadwinning formula of cinematic third person action games, everything that couldn't fit into that mold just died off (except gran turismo i guess).
then they started chasing the live service dragon, put like 19 live service games in development, then bought bungie with the intention to bolster their capability to produce and maintain these games, only for bungie to come back and tell them most of the games would fail (wow, no shit sherlock!). so they gutted the live service initiative and presumably astronomic amounts of developers' work ended up being a wash.
the other platform holders still suck, but at least microsoft and nintendo understand on some level that older works are worth preserving and that variety is good for the industry. meanwhile at sony if it's not shiny and expensive then it's not worth a damn. games are like luxury cars, a product to be used and disposed of once it's no longer impressive at first glance.
Sony is great at making stuff that feels premium, but they used to be able to do this while also cultivating fertile ground for extremely strange and interesting games to blossom from. It feels like the focus has become increasingly “make a thing that feels premium” without much to actually play on it beyond a handful of high-production-value tentpoles. You need the weird little freak games, too, guys
