Sackboy: A Big Adventure Drops on PC

In the annals of LittleBigPlanet, Sackboy: A Big Adventure is a sad footnote. Not because of the quality of the game, I hasten to add. But because it seems so often people forget it exists. Even Sony themselves, as the PC release has been a very quiet affair.

A PS5 launch title, aimed primarily at families, it shouldn’t be a big surprise that it isn’t spoken about in the same breath as Horizon or God of War. But hopefully a few years on, it can find a new audience on a new platform.

But that’s unlikely to happen if Sony don’t tell anybody it has released. Initial sales on Steam are muted: about 10,000 compared to about 160,000 for Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves. That difference compares a single day to nine, and comes from SteamDB, so it’s not exactly the most accurate of readings. But what we know, is that it has very quietly hit the platform.

That’s fine. Not every single title needs to be met with a giant fanfare. In fact, I would suggest that marketing expectations are what cause so many problems within this industry.

And it should also be said – perhaps in hushed tones – that it is also on the Epic store. I’m sure it’s sold dozens of copies there as well.

Sackboy – A Shadowdrop

When less than 600 people make up your absolute peak 24-hours after launch, something somewhere has gone wrong. It’s a curious experiment for Sony, who are still trying to figure out their business model outside of PlayStation.

If that’s what they’re doing, they’re going to start thinking something isn’t working. Their releases are trending downwards in terms of popularity. Why? It’d be easy to make presumptions and get up in arms about certain ways of them handling things. Releasing older games in the manner that they are, for instance, is a drum I’d love to beat.

But the reality is that it’s all those things and more. Most obviously, their last few releases have been bizarre spin-offs or sequels to games that never released on PC. Buy Uncharted 4 – because the mystique of the PlayStation Studios logo and reputation should be more important than having a full series. But Sackboy’s Big Adventure, because why not?

PC isn’t like console. People buy PlayStation games on a PlayStation systems because they’re first-party and they know what they’re doing. They have earned that reputation in that space. That doesn’t exist on PC.

This goes one of three ways. They realise something isn’t happening that should be, and so they change up how they handle PC or they leave it exactly the same and declare it a failed experiment.

Or, and this is most likely, they release God of War 2 or Horizon 2, see massive numbers again, and the cycle continues.

Either way, this is all a longwinded way of saying I hope this means Sackboy ends up on PlayStation Plus in some capacity too. It has already been weirdly absent from the service, which boasts a host of other first-party titles from before and after. Maybe the wait for a PC release and a new wave of talk about the game is exactly what Sony have been waiting for.

Wishful thinking? I’ll let you decide.