In last weeks IGN interview, Alex Evans gave an interesting insight in to some of the IP issues the LittleBigPlanet has encountered since launch, telling us that some companies have requested to be white listed. That is to say, they’ll never ask Media Molecule to pull any content containing any of their IP.
So, who are these companies asking to be whitelisted in LBP?
Well, one company certainly isn’t complaining: EA. LittleBigPlanet community levels like the beta-built Mirrors Edge and the more recent Little Dead Space have been racking up a wealth of plays in the game and a huge amount of discussion and promotion on the web. A search in Google for ‘“little big planet” “mirrors edge”‘ brings around 300,000 search results - the number of times its been talked about by major gaming sites is incredible. And why would EA complain about that? It’s essentially free advertising within both a popular AAA game and it’s online web based community.
Of course, first party developers like Team Ico haven’t exactly been up in arms about their games Ico and Shadow of the Colossus being used in levels either. But then, we’d hope that community levels based on first party titles would always be excused from moderation based on copyright issues.
So, if you want to build a level in LittleBigPlanet based on a big game franchise then the options are clear: Choose a first party title published by Sony, or an EA game. And when it comes to EA, there are plenty to choose from...
There’s only one way to find out, right?
Seems like madness for IP holders to complain about this, really. It’s such good advertising if the level becomes popular it’s hard to see any downside at all.
I wonder how many people decided to get into MGS after the MGS4 content pack, incidentally.
This is very interesting. I also have a hunch that Capcom is white listed as well, for two resons; number one, the Street Fighter costume pack and number two, Capcom showed off a MegaMan level on the Blog.
Good point John. Considering Capcoms Street Fighter II costume pack, they’re clearly another company that has some kind of interest in the game.
