Something everyone hears while growing up in life is that “you should never bite the hand that feeds you” and in the gaming industry when it comes to public relations (unless your Kotick), it’s a law to live by. Recently, Alex Evan of Media Molecule and one of the leading roleplayers behind LittleBigPlanet and LittleBigPlanet 2 stated that most publishers, “especially Sony, is that they’re not in it for a quick buck.”

The nice thing about the industry, and I think you see it in all of the big publishers, Sony especially, is that they’re not in it for a quick buck. There’s no point, especially for a first party title, putting out something that’s nearly there, like 99% there […] Sony have been so amazingly supportive. It’s not easy to phone them up and go ‘Guys, we’re not there yet’. You know, they could have said ‘Fuck it, we don’t care’ and the point is, they didn’t.”

Now, it’s up to you whether to decide if this is an incident of not biting that hand or that Evans genuinely feels that most publishers would rather push creativity and quality than the girth of its wallets. It’s easy to look at a poorly made game and point your finger at the latter, but is it possible that maybe the development team wasn’t talented enough to create an engaging project? It’s also quite easy to take note of the amount of patches released within games this generation and speculate that developers release games with well known issues that they plan to remedy down the road.

Regardless of which side of the fence you wish to game on, it should be known that a lot of developers do push creativity in the forms of titles like Evans’ LittleBigPlanet or DICE’s Mirror’s Edge. These new IPs are risks and publishers do take those risks in the sake of creativity, but they also take those risks with the hope of a big return from the investment as well.

Do you think Evans is being genuine in this situation or is he just making sure that the hand is still there holding food when he gets home?