Following a “temporary” outage that started in January this year due to technical issues, Sony has revealed it’s made the decision to take the servers for LittleBigPlanet 3 offline permanently.
As a result of all online services being shut down, access to the millions of player-made creations for the game is now impossible, which is a shame for the LittleBigPlanet community who weren’t anticipating a complete shutdown. Recently, a similar situation occurred with the online servers for the WiiU and 3DS being closed off a couple of weeks ago and Super Mario Maker players rallying to play as many user-generated levels as they could before the end, an opportunity that LBP3 players won’t have.
Here’s what an update on the official PlayStation website has to say about the changes:
LittleBigPlanet 3
Due to ongoing technical issues which resulted in the LittleBigPlanet 3 servers for PS4 being taken offline temporarily in January 2024, the decision has been made to keep the servers offline indefinitely. All online services including access to other players’ creations for LittleBigPlanet 3 are no longer available. User generated content (UGC) stored locally on your PS4 will remain available. Any new UGC you create can be played on your PS4 but not shared. Offline features such as the campaign will remain playable.
It’s been a bleak time for those of us who’d spend dozens of hours meticulously crafting levels, sharing them with friends and downloading the most cooked and punishing user creations from around the globe. Earlier this year, footage emerged of an early build of LittleBigPlanet Hub, a free-to-play live service take on the adorable PlayStation platformer series that was announced over 10 years ago and then never saw the light of day, and original LittleBigPlanet developers MediaMolecule also recently (allegedly) canned a project of their own, with a PS5 and PC port of the fantastic Dreams supposedly being nearly finished and then abandoned.
