Multiple gaming news sites reported last week that at CES 2009, Kaz Hirai stated that LittleBigPlanet had sold 1.3 million copies worldwide.
Well, that’s not entirely the case. In the actual keynote video itself, Kaz came on stage and gave a breakdown of PSN’s success to date. Moving on to use LittleBigPlanet as an example of how PSN is creating new communities, he said:
So today, more than 1.3 million unique users are playing this title.
No doubt then, that LittleBigPlanet has sold 1.3 million copies, but no doubt either that the actual number of copies sold is likely to be somewhat higher than 1.3 million. The number given was in reference to PSN and implies that there are 1.3 million unique users on PSN playing the game. Not a sales figure.
We were a bit confused when the ‘sales figure‘ was first announced as there was no accompanying press release, but mainstream press took the ball and ran with it anyways.
Questionable video gaming sales chart site, VGchartz.com currently has LittleBigPlanet total number of worldwide sales at 1.86 million.
You can watch the keynote yourself, in the full video. Kaz Hirai arrives at around 40 minutes in to the video and the quote above can be heard at around 42 minutes 30 seconds.
Unique users can’t reliably tell us one way or the other about sales. There could be a lot of people with the game that haven’t signed in and are playing only offline. There could also be a lot of people that have signed on with the game using a friend or family member’s copy. LBP isn’t a one account per disc deal, so there is no way to know. One could assume that these two numbers of unknown quantities cancel each other out, but that wouldn’t be a sound assumption.
well mr. boogie has a point but still there could be ways to find out we just need to wait the xmas break an by feb or latest on jan there should be numbers on LBP… hope that at least made tha 2millies
