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[MightyHedgehog]

LBP 1 and 2 are fantastic games which absolutely pave over anything outside of the PC realm in terms of content.

I like the way LBP controls, but even going with the assumption that they are horrible...

Games with awful controls that sold well:

-Silent Hill
-Resident Evil
-Grand Theft Auto 3
-Tomb Raider (series)


Games with great controls that sold poorly:

-Jet Set Radio Future
-F-Zero GX
-Viewtiful Joe


There are more factors than just controls which will determine how a game sells. Its promotion, appeal (both domestic and worldwide), release date, and platform all have a much greater impact on sales than subjective concepts like "controls" ever could.

But controls are still the number one thing when it comes to gaming. You can have sub-optimal controls and some glaring weaknesses, but the overall feel still matters. Now, I'm not against anyone who likes/loves this game and others which have non-standard feel, but the genre they chose to put it in is highly competitive and the prevailing preference in platformers has long been defined by Ninty and others who follow in their footsteps, with a focus on pixel-perfect control in the X/Y axis. MM dare to be different at their own peril and while they've sold well, I won't be surprised when the included campaign for LBP3 or PS4's first installment changes the feel from the first two or, at minimum, includes an alternate take on the feel of the controls...one that feels snappier and closer to more popular platformers.

Then LBP controls aren't floaty... it's inertia. Specially since it's all physics based to begin with.

Just because it's possibly more accurate or more physically correct in some sense doesn't mean people will dig it. It's still a game that people have to enjoy playing, after all. So, floatiness is a pretty good way to say that, in relative terms, LBP is less snappy feeling than a Mario game or any other platformer which takes its lesssons from it and others like it. That Mario has endured over twenty-five years of competition and still remains the most popular platformer property (by many times) and still represents the basic template for the genre says a lot about how much people prefer it to the competition regardless of how much more is included with them.

 

[Zeouterlimits]

Super floaty.

Wah-hey, got it in one.
I bought the first and not the second. The aesthetics and a lot of the ideas are charming, but the controls and floatiness of the sackboys.. just weren't appealing.

 

[Speevy]

Well, most people is giving the same reason: gameplay sucks.ar.

In this thread they are. In the market at large, there are bigger factors.

I've given them.

You cannot substantiate why something as historically trivial as "controls" would outweigh platform, genre, appeal, advertising, and release date.

It's impossible. All of those affect how any game sells much more than controls. Even review scores have a bigger impact.

 

[Kazerei]

LBP seems pretty popular to me ... most of my casual gaming friends have played it or know of it. Comparing to SMG is a bit silly, Mario is the most popular platforming franchise ever.

 

[jman2050]

So you're saying that I can set Mario on a single platform with nowhere to jump, and simply because the controls are good, that's enough?

Gameplay mechanics and level design are inseparable from each other. Captain Olimar can't survive the purple coin challenge in Super Mario Galaxy any more than Mario can command an army of Pikmin.

You're basically agreeing with me. The point of my statement was to point out that there's an intrinsic link between level design and mechanics for a platformer. Your level design needs to be designed properly to take advantage of good mechanics, yes, but no amount of level design will 'fix' bad mechanics.

And yes, I do think that having good mechanics can go a long way in masking deficiencies in level design, and I don't think the opposite is true.

 

[Speevy]

But controls are still the number one thing when it comes to gaming. You can have sub-optimal controls and some glaring weaknesses, but the overall feel still matters. Now, I'm not against anyone who likes/loves this game and others which have non-standard feel, but the genre they chose to put it in is highly competitive and the prevailing preference in platformers has long been defined by Ninty and others who follow in their footsteps, with a focus on pixel-perfect control in the X/Y axis. MM dare to be different at their own peril and while they've sold well, I won't be surprised when the included campaign for LBP3 or PS4's first installment changes the feel from the first two or, at minimum, includes an alternate take on the feel of the controls...one that feels snappier and closer to more popular platformers.
.

Do you not understand that I don't necessarily disagree with any of that, but none of it contradicts what I've said about why this game isn't selling.

 

[Apath]

There is something (floaty-ness, I guess) about the platform mechanics I just don't really like too much. I would rather play something like Mario instead.

 

[Kusagari]

Because it simply isn't that fun.

 

[Speevy]

Here's some food for thought.

Jet Set Radio Future has fantastic controls. This game bombed when it released, and was almost immediately sold as a free pack-in to the Xbox.

If I made a topic about why it isn't more popular, you wouldn't say "Because it controls poorly."

You'd consider a number of other factors...as you should here.

 

[SykoTech]

Do you not understand that I don't necessarily disagree with any of that, but none of it contradicts what I've said about why this game isn't selling.

Hardly anyone here is giving a good reason about LBP's sales. They're just throwing their personal opinions around. "Wrong platform" is probably the only solid answer here.

 

[Speevy]

Hardly anyone here is giving a good reason about LBP's sales. .

I believe I am.

 

[beelzebozo]

Because it simply isn't that fun.

yeah, i think this is the long and the short of it. it's just. . .boring. like most "make your own" games/products, the making is presumed to be at least 50% of the fun, while the result of your making is always some kind of handicapped "A for effort" experience.

it's a lot like an easy bake oven.

"wow, i made a cookie mom!

. . . why does it taste like this."

 

[neutralgamer02]

Actually it does seem as if LBP is pretty popular, it just that LBP2 sort of didn't meet sales expectations for some reason.

 

[Sapphire Dreams]

Why isn't it more popular ? Bad marketing, simple as that.

 

[charlequin]

lol @ floaty gameplay complaints. Stop trying to play it like Mario.

There are lots of successful platformers whose controls are quite different from those in Mario games (hell, the Mario games even each have different physics) but what unifies basically all well-regarded platform games is the level of detail on the controls. Much like racing games, platformers are objectively better when they have precise, responsive controls. This isn't a taste question, it's a craftsmanship question. LBP is a very impressive package overall, but the controls are so poorly implemented that they drag the whole thing down a notch.

At least for LBP2, I don't understand it, because they designed the campaign to work inoffensively with the jumping controls. There's not a single level where you'll have to precisely land on a speck of terrain to survive

I rest my case.

There's movement after I stop pressing the controls, and a delay when turning the other way. That's what I consider to be floaty

That's not floatiness. I think probably the best term for that is "slipperiness," since it's the mechanic platformers generally use on ice surfaces etc. A platformer is slippery if your character has a lot of momentum and reverse acceleration has to fight back against it.

Floatiness has to do with the time it takes for input to affect the character's behavior. With really good controls, the character will start responding immediately, to the degree that your hand motions are truly translated directly onto the character's onscreen behavior. When the controls are floaty, you start moving and your character responds like a quarter second later, which breaks that 1:1 correspondence. This is why most platformers become basically unplayable on a TV with high input lag.

Precision is the other area where LBP's controls fall down for me: in a really good platformer, the same inputs will always produce precisely the same behavior in the character, but physics-based controls tend to have a lot of invisible breakpoints such that your inputs can't be predicted entirely reliably.

 

[Mooreberg]

The franchise launched when PS3 was still too expensive. See also: Resistance, MotorStorm, etc.

Uncharted seems to be the series that made it out alive, probably because of UC2 coming out just after the $299.99 price drop.

 

[Speevy]

Actually it does seem as if LBP is pretty popular, it just that LBP2 sort of didn't meet sales expectations for some reason.

Which is also true. We're just in a generation where everything has to sell several million or the studio closes.

 

[Karsticles]

I dislike the platforming physics. Too floaty.

 

[Ninja_Hawk]

Hardly anyone here is giving a good reason about LBP's sales. They're just throwing their personal opinions around. "Wrong platform" is probably the only solid answer here.

Because the question doesn't make that much sense to begin with all things considered. LBP has been a critical and commercial success. It's no mega-franchise but considering what it is and what its got going against it, its done very well for itself. It's some of the most fun i've ever had playing videogames honestly, one of the defining moments of this generation for me has been doing coop with my cousins, slapping each other around, collecting bubbles, and discovering new awesome (and terrible) levels. Some people take issues with the controls, I haven't met any personally, but clearly a few people on GAF do. But clearly alot of people are fine with it as well and enjoy the games. *shrugs* I don't see any more to it than this.

 

[Sinoox]

LBP2 is probably the most underrated game in this generation... if only more people knew what this game holds they wouldn't miss it.

Underrated? I think overlooked would be the word.

 

[SykoTech]

I believe I am.

Didn't mean you, but okay.

Because the question doesn't make that much sense to begin with all things considered. LBP has been a critical and commercial success. It's no mega-franchise but considering what it is and what its got going against it, its done very well for itself. It's some of the most fun i've ever had playing videogames honestly, one of the defining moments of this generation for me has been doing coop with my cousins, slapping each other around, collecting bubbles, and discovering new awesome (and terrible) levels. Some people take issues with the controls, I haven't met any personally, but clearly a few people on GAF do. But clearly alot of people are fine with it as well and enjoy the games. *shrugs* I don't see any more to it than this.

You're thoughts are pretty much my experience with the games in a nutshell.

 

[jman2050]

Then LBP controls aren't floaty... it's inertia. Specially since it's all physics based to begin with.

That's another thing for me actually. Saying that the game mechanics are "physics-based" makes for a pretty nifty bullet point and advertising line, but I wonder if that design methodology wasn't flawed from the word "go." I get that Media Molecule was trying to frame their game as a realistic playground of sorts, the type of environment where a kid would build and play pretend games with their toys, and that's all fine and good. It almost seems, though, that they designed the intricacies of the platforming around that premise without completely considering how it would function in the context of what people come to expect from platformers.

 

[Man God]

I hated LBP 1 so much that when I got a nice PS3 bundle this black friday the first thing I did was put LBP 2 Special Edition up for sale.

Juding by how the price drastically fell on new copies I wasn't the only one.

 

[Speevy]

I hated LBP 1 so much that when I got a nice PS3 bundle this black friday the first thing I did was put LBP 2 Special Edition up for sale.

Juding by how the price drastically fell on new copies I wasn't the only one.

Maybe the bundle had more to do with it...

 

[Kusagari]

Hardly anyone here is giving a good reason about LBP's sales. They're just throwing their personal opinions around. "Wrong platform" is probably the only solid answer here.

LBP1 is one of the best selling PS3 games. 2 'bombed' for what could be a variety of reasons. People who fell for the hype of 1 and thought it wasn't great (like a good portion of this thread) didn't buy it, the fact that it launched with nowhere as much advertising or the fact that it launched in the dead month of January with no real fanfare.

Who knows the real reason.

 

[Monty Mole]

From a pure platformer point of view, LBP was a massive disappointment with floaty and frustrating controls making for little in the way of fun. And I have no interest in making my own levels. I'm not alone.

It also seemed incredibly up its own arse, with the whole dev-team intro level thing in the sequel too.

 

[Freshmaker]

I can only speak for myself, but the whole sackboy thing makes me not care.

 

[CouchMaster]

The franchise launched when PS3 was still too expensive. See also: Resistance, MotorStorm, etc.

Uncharted seems to be the series that made it out alive, probably because of UC2 coming out just after the $299.99 price drop.

TBH almost all Sony first party games have been on steady decline in terms of sales except Uncharted series. The more sequels they pump out, the less it sales even with higher install base, its baffling really.

 

[Raonak]

One of the better PS3 games. Loved the first one so much. Platinumed!
Either people didn't like the controls I didn't really see a problem with it, allowed more precise jumping based on how long you pressed down the x button and allowed easy finetuning of jumps.
first one sold lots,
I guess the second one didn't change enough in most people eyes. Although; most sony exclusives tend to decline (not advertising?), so it getting 1million+ means it still sold good.

 

[Pseudo_Sam]

Has there ever been a game focused so much around user-generated content that's sold more than LBP? Genuinely curious.

I think games like that ask too much of the general gaming audience, which (generally) lacks the creativity and patience needed to really get the most out of the package. What they end up with is a collection of mediocre platforming levels and an intimidating editor that they'll never want to devote the time or energy to to really grasp it beyond a fundamental level. They buy games to play them, not make them, and of course there are consumers who love that sort of d.i.y. independence thing (myself included), but I would wager we're in the minority.

I don't think it had much to do with the controls for most people.

 

[charlequin]

Why is this so hard to understand?

Because your position is nonsense. Let's go over your list.

-Silent Hill
-Resident Evil
-Grand Theft Auto 3
-Tomb Raider (series)

There are two things all four of these games have in common: they were all immense right-place-right-time successes as a result of defining brand new genres... and they've all seen so much positive iteration on their control schemes that many people consider the originals unplayably dated today. Yes, these certainly prove that a game can succeed despite control problems -- but all of these titles offered something completely unprecedented and deeply appealing (not a claim LBP can make) and all of them nonetheless rapidly moved to fix that control deficit.

The idea that nitpicking over controls is a core gamer hobby horse is absurd. (If anything, core gamers are unusually willing to tolerate terrible controls when a game has other things to offer -- see Team Ico.) There are plenty of things dedicated hobbyists make hay about (achievements and bonus content, length, innovation, and especially graphics) that are irrelevant to most people's gaming experiences, but controls are the very core of gaming, the singular thing that separates a game from a static entertainment. When someone who games casually or is starting out for the first time tries a game that controls poorly, they don't necessarily know what the problem is, only that the experience of interacting with the game is frustrating and unpleasant instead of fun and natural. This is like game craftsmanship 101 -- the clearer and less resistant the core feedback loop between the player and the screen is, the more easily you can convince someone to lose themselves in the experience.

 

[jman2050]

Here's some food for thought.

Jet Set Radio Future has fantastic controls. This game bombed when it released, and was almost immediately sold as a free pack-in to the Xbox.

If I made a topic about why it isn't more popular, you wouldn't say "Because it controls poorly."

You'd consider a number of other factors...as you should here.

I'm of the belief that good games that don't sell are an issue of visibility, marketing, and demographics, in that order. That's just the cold reality of how the market works. In LBP's case (the original anyway), the only one of those factors that seemed to work against it was demographics, and even then, selling nearly 5 million copies indicates that there's SOME sort of audience there to work with. Sony made damn sure that people knew LBP existed, being aggressive with its pricing, constantly having it available for bundling by retailers, and, don't forget, GIVING AWAY the entire game for FREE after the whole PSN fiasco.As I said earlier, Sony most definitely tried to ram this game down people's throats.

I think what's more telling is what happened with the second game (and the PSP game, but I don't think that applies completely here). Without the advantages of incredibly aggressive marketing (still not sure why Sony eased off for the second game, there was no good reason to) and the visibility that comes from launching in the holiday season, the only thing it could rely on was whatever audience it built off the previous title. Apparently, that ended up being smaller than we thought, not that it doesn't still have some volume behind it.

Why the dropoff? Either most LBP1 purchasers were happy with just the first game, which is a valid possibility, or when all was said and done they just didn't care for the game enough to bother with the sequel. Either scenario is not good for the franchises's prospects.

 

[LuchaShaq]

Honestly for me it's 100% the controls. I love the art, I love watching youtube clips of crazy levels, but the basic run and jump platforming levels are so poor that I would never want to play it again unless it's a 100% new engine.

 

[Man God]

Has there ever been a game focused so much around user-generated content that's sold more than LBP? Genuinely curious.

Minecraft most likely.

 

[daviyoung]

It's a really good multiplayer game.

 

[Nessus]

I got it for free when Sony lost our credit card information, and I don't really like the floaty controls. I wish they had built a better 2D (strictly 2D; no walking in and out of the foreground) platforming foundation on which to base their game, with lots of premade enemy characters, power ups, etc.

I think what they did is amazing, the scope of it and the possibilities, and seeing what players have subsequently come up with using those tools, I just wish the fundamental gameplay were better.

 

[Samara]

Now I know I'm not a very good player. I'm actually playing it right now with my niece. We can't make it past the Mexican level. We either get stuck, make some weird jumps, and it's always the same shit: Sackgirl just slids off and we die. I've had the game for about 8 months now and can't make it past the 4th level?!?

Now we love making Sackgirls (mine is so cute) but its just too hard

 

[jman2050]

Minecraft most likely.

It's not quite there yet but it assuredly will be in the near future.

 

[Mooreberg]

TBH almost all Sony first party games have been on steady decline in terms of sales except Uncharted series. The more sequels they pump out, the less it sales even with higher install base, its baffling really.

The games they needed out when the hardware was expensive (God of War, Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy, etc) didn't see light until the price was down anyway and I think the games that sold better before withered once more choices became available. And as far as shooters go, Call of Duty is all that matters to a lot of people. Halo Reach seems to have sold slower than Halo 3 despite the big jump in hardware install base.

 

[Raonak]

Actually, now i think of it; couldn't this thread be made for every sony game that isn't uncharted, GOW, or GT5

 

[Suairyu]

That's not floatiness. I think probably the best term for that is "slipperiness," since it's the mechanic platformers generally use on ice surfaces etc. A platformer is slippery if your character has a lot of momentum and reverse acceleration has to fight back against it.

This is also my one complaint about Super Mario 64, which is otherwise a perfect game - Mario is too damn slippery, regardless of surface. It can be very difficult revisiting it after playing Galaxy for this reason.

 

[petethepanda]

Marketed more? really?

Sony's been shoving these games down everyone's throat from day one. Whether the marketing was effective or not I can't say for sure, but it certainly wasn't from lack of trying.

I saw a lot of marketing on gaming websites and forums and such, but that's kind of preaching to the choir. Hardly saw any out in the real world.

"Better" is definitely a concern too. The one TV commercial I ever saw for the series gave absolutely no impression of what the game was actually like.

 

[Man God]

You can't fault LBP 1 for a lack of marketing. They started showing it in tv ads months before the game launched.

 

[jett]

Then LBP controls aren't floaty... it's inertia. Specially since it's all physics based to begin with.

Seriously though, what's the difference? What's "floaty" then?

That's why the controls are garbage. Entirely physics-based controls have no place in a platformer. Have no place anywhere but in driving simulators. Loathe that shit, personally. It just feels likes twitchy, unresponsive ass.

Someone said earlier that it feels like this game was designed by engineers and programmers. I think that was spot on.

 

[charlequin]

The franchise launched when PS3 was still too expensive. See also: Resistance, MotorStorm, etc.

Uncharted seems to be the series that made it out alive, probably because of UC2 coming out just after the $299.99 price drop.

Uncharted is the series that made it out alive because it's head and shoulders above the other new IPs on PS3 in quality. Playing UC1 made people much more likely to buy UC2 day one and to push the game on their friends, which didn't really happen with games like Motorstorm (and the opposite happened, I suspect, for games like Killzone and LBP.)

 

[Tunavi]

Wow, didn't know there was so much hate for LBP...

 

[El-Suave]

LBP 1 was too hard for casual Jump' n Run Players to stick with it. Having a limited number of lives was a stupid idea for this kind of game. I'm talking from first hand experience because my niece wasn't able to finish it and she was turned off in the process.

 

[jman2050]

Someone said earlier that it feels like this game was designed by engineers and programmers. I think that was spot on.

Hey now, we programmers are perfectly capable of designing good games!

We just have to know our own strengths and weaknesses and adjust accordingly is all.

 

[Limanima]

LBP1 sold 4.5? Wow, that's pretty good. er ... Isn't it?

Love the game.

 

[Mooreberg]

Uncharted is the series that made it out alive because it's head and shoulders above the other new IPs on PS3 in quality.

That is a good point but I get leery on the quality to sales ratios. There seems to be a growing disconnect when you see the annual top ten seller lists.