The future of community gaming

I must confess that I have no experience with LittleBigPlanet? . However, I think it would be useful for this argument to consider the specific characteristics of platformer gaming, as opposed to other genres of games that have previously put content creation in the user's hands.

For example, Neverwinter Nights allowed users to create their own multi-player online role playing game (RPG) content, but that has not caused a demise of either the RPG generally or the online RPG market (World of Warcraft's second expansion, Warhammer Online and Age of Conan were all recently released, and the announcement of Diablo 3's development has been greeted with much excitement).

Similarly, the vastly popular Counter-Strike mod was created for the Half-Life first-person shooter engine about a decade ago, but it does not seem to have discouraged commercially produced content for such games (such as Call of Duty). And while Counter-Strike was initially released as a free mod, it was eventually packaged and sold as a commercial product.

Alternatively, does your argument relate to console gaming specifically? If so, the recently-released Guitar Hero World Tour also allows users to create their own content: http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/55761

-- JasonChan - 10 Dec 2008