How Many People Play LittleBigPlanet? The Truth!
I often hear a lot of people talk about how small the LittleBigPlanet community is. They tell me about how big, active, and awesome it used to be compared to how it is now. Just based off of my personal experience, I have agreed with them to a point. However, I'm not sure how accurate this is. How many people play LittleBigPlanet in 2021?
Based on our research, we've found that LittleBigPlanet's community is certainly not dwindling. In fact, it's growing. To find out how big the LittleBigPlanet community is, we'll have to dive into a few different sources.
Background
There has never been an official count of how many people play LittleBigPlanet. We have been able to see in the past how many people are playing online based on in-game counters. However, this only measures how many people are playing at a given time and doesn't reflect how many people own and play the game.
We should also consider the fact that people who own the game don't necessarily play it online. They may only play offline or may only play online occasionally. There also is no formal definition of an 'active player'. Is it someone who plays at least once daily? Once per week? Once a month?
There's a lot of complexity here, and we may not find exactly what we're looking for. However, we can look at the information that is available to us and make informed conclusions based on them. Our conclusions and assumptions may not be 100% correct, but we can do the best we can to determine how many people play LittleBigPlanet.
Gamstats Player Count
According to Gamstats.com, LittleBigPlanet 3 had 12.13 million players in November 2020. In fact, this player count has been increasing since the game's release in 2014. This is contrary to the arguments I've heard that LittleBigPlanet's community has been decreasing in size over time. So, is the information true? Let's figure out how they calculated it.
Gamstats.com claims that they obtain data based on PlayStation Network API. An API is an 'application programming interface'. What this means is that it's a key that allows software to work with certain types of information from a different source. In this case, Gamstats uses the API to pull data from PlayStation Network.
What is Gamstats actually measuring? According to them, they record information based on PlayStation Trophy data. Whenever you earn a trophy, it records the time and date on Sony's server. Gamstats can see this data on a larger scale to determine who owns what game and how many trophies people have.
What makes the data especially valuable – is the fact that PSN also publishes the date when every trophy in the game was earned. By looking at the earliest trophy we learn when each player started it. (Well, often with a lag of a couple of days, which is a small price to pay for learning what PSN looked like years ago.) Even if a player hasn't earned any trophy, the game still appears in the trophy list with the date it was launched.
These numbers are not absolute. To better refine their data, Gamstats uses leaked data from sources like the My PS4 Life promotion leak which disclosed personal statistics for many PlayStation users. This is how they are able to come up with more accurate counts for the number of players of LittleBigPlanet games.
Community Size
The number of people who play LittleBigPlanet is not necessarily representative of how many people are engaged or part of its online community. How can we determine the size of the community? There are a few different ways to do so. There are various social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube that can help us make some estimates. These are less precise, but they can give us some broader information about what's going on out there.
LittleBigPlanet on YouTube
LittleBigPlanet has a significant following on YouTube. Popular LBP commentator Nerdyant64 did some interesting research on this topic to discover some insights about the number of people interested in LittleBigPlanet content on YouTube.
Nerdyant64 also used the Gamstats information that I discussed earlier on in this article, but he also wisely assumed that we could take a guess at the amount of interest in the LittleBigPlanet community online through YouTube analytics. For example, BlazingVictini, a YouTuber who often posts LittleBigPlanet content, achieved 63 thousand views as of the writing of this post on his video, The Death of LBP is Imminent.
This does not mean that at least 63 thousand people are interested in LittleBigPlanet on YouTube. There may be more or less. A single user might be attributable to multiple views as well. It's difficult to say. BlazingVictini has 23.6 thousand subscribers as of the writing of this article.
Unfortunately, it can be a bit difficult to determine the actual size of the LittleBigPlanet community. However, we can measure a few other insights. One of the main ways that we can use to make an estimate of the minimum amount of people at least interested in the LittleBigPlanet community right now would be to check the analytics of the latest official LittleBigPlanet tweets. The latest tweet that they posted currently has about 1,500 likes. A previous tweet that they posted about the LittleBigPlanet servers has 2,000 likes.
This seems substantially lower than the volume we can see on YouTube. However, another subject of interest is the #SaveLBP hashtag spawned by the recent server outages. According to a quote I was able to get from TrackMyHashtag, I was able to discover that there are around 16,000 tweets mentioning #SaveLBP. There certainly weren't 16,000 people tweeting, but even if we were conservative and assume that 10 people per tweet were responsible, that's 1,600 people.