Media Molecule's Alex Evans

It's an interesting question. A couple of things spring to mind - we laboured a long time recently over the free demo we'll be releasing shortly, and one of the reasons we didn't release it beforehand was the question of how do you capture its essence, as you say?

So I think we've done a good job on the demo, but the 'virgin snow' effect, like the first comments in forums - we had this big argument between various people within Media Molecule and Sony: Would the hardcore people who bought it on day one want an empty planet with no content, or would they want the stuff that had been made in the past month by the beta-testers?

One side argued that they'd want to be the first ones to make stuff, but the other camp argued that they'd have a better experience on day one if they could benefit from the beta content, with a few thousand levels.

So we did an online poll, including people who weren't on the beta, and the result was that 90 per cent of the people wanted to keep the beta content, compared to 10 per cent who wanted us to ditch it.

We thought it was going to be more 50-50, but we realised that the LBP beta trial drove that experience. It didn't take two months, it took one trial of 100,000 people, and you already had that seeded data. We're actually going to start off another beta trial on a rolling basis, a little bit smaller than the original one - but again, it's that MMO mentality. You'll get rewards in the main game for being in the beta trial, and we'll push features out to them first and gauge feedback. It's constantly feeding value into the people going the official route, so it helps both parties.

But the beta trial was what solved the issue.

Yeah, I would have liked to have made it better. We originally started with a shotgun and a hair dryer, and it mutated a lot... One of the things we're focusing on next is looking at stuff that insane - generally French and Japanese - people have built, and then making that more accessible, just making some of the ideas that are possible, easier.

The second side of it is that at the moment you can exchange objects via PSN messages. One of the original ideas that was axed from the original game was that you could publish objects from the game online, not just levels, and you'd be credited with the use of those objects.

I think something like that will really boost it - if you're just a beginner user, you can go and browse not just for levels, but for cars, let's say. Take that, sticker it up, and you're done - and that will change the barriers to entry.

So both of those things - changing the tools themselves, and changing how you share - are coming.

Yes, because there's that point where you think: "I can never make something like that." And then you realise that some people can.

Before we shipped, people were quoting articles about what percentage of YouTube users actually upload videos to the site - but if you look at the sales figures for LBP versus the number of videos that have been published, it's way out of kilter.

That's awesome, and I don't know the science as to how we did it, but I think it's partly that gamers are just way more dedicated. As a market, even the non-hardcore ones, they seem to care more. Forget the achievement- and trophy-whoring - if you've made a level, you really care about it and want to shout about it.

Yes, to show off. It's like ultimate showing off, basically.