No, they’re down. No, they’re up again!

LittleBigPlanet went on sale two days ago to glowing reviews, but a vital component of the game, the online servers that let people share their level creations, were out to lunch.

The servers came back up briefly, then went down again. Fortunately, the included levels are absolutely brilliant, so probably few people were actually hurting for stuff to play.

Thing is, I am really not a fan of this trend of shipping console games and then leaving major chunks of it unfinished until after it’s already in the hands of paying customers.

It happened recently with Rock Band 2, when the free songs advertised on the box didn’t become available until much later. It almost happened with Fable 2’s online cooperative multiplayer, but that got wrapped up in time for a zero-day patch.

LBP without sharing levels, though, is an even bigger piece of the game. (Kotaku called it a third by some unscientific estimation.) It’s like hyping up YouTube, and then on lauch day the part that lets users submit videos is missing.

I know video game development is a frantic race against the clock, especially when you’re trying to get something out the door. But in the space of a console generation, we’ve gone from PC-style ship-n-patch to a whole new ship-n-finish-the-product-at-all model.

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