Sony couldn't have hyped its community platform game, Little Big Planet, any more than it has, yet it doesn't seem to have quite had the desired effect.

Despite high review scores on Metacritic, including many sites and publications (of course the Official Playstation Magazine included) awarding it with a suspiciously generous 100%, it has failed to commercially perform as expected.

A quick glance at this week's videogame charts, which sees Call of Duty World At War, World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King and Football Manager 2009 sitting in 1st,2nd and 3rd places respectively, reveals that Little Big Planet has dropped dramatically from 4th position, where it debuted on its release, right down to 19th.

So what's gone wrong?

"In other times of the year [LBP] would be a clear number one, so you have to put the chart in context. This is an incredibly volatile time of year and the chart reflects that," a Sony spokesperson told Eurogamer. We assume by "volatile" he means stiff competition from bigger and more established brands?

Whatever the excuse, Sony doesn't seem to be to worried, stating that it is "pleased with its commercial performance" and still believing that there is plenty of time for Sackboy to become the iconic new character for Playstation 3 that they'd hoped.

Despite the poor start to Sackboy's career,Sony is still very confident that Little Big Planet can drive sales of the PS3 hardware this Christmas. "The bulk of our marketing including our six figure TV advertising campaign doesn't roll out until December, so we genuinely believe that Sackboy hasn't even hit his stride yet."

If not, it's back to the drawing board.

Source :: Eurogamer