LittleBigPlanet 3’s servers have been taken down permanently.
PlayStation shared this message on the official Twitter account for LittleBigPlanet:
“Due to ongoing technical issues which resulted in the LittleBigPlanet 3 servers for PlayStation 4 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.
Thank you for your support.”
LittleBigPlanet 3 was originally published on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 from November to December 2014, across different regions. Sony never officially shared the title’s sales figures, but we know some of this data as a consequence of the Insomniac ransomware hack.
As a reminder, we do not condone the way this data was acquired, but like Pandora’s Box, there’s not point to pretending that this information is not freely available to the public.
As noted in the LittleBigPlanet subreddit, LittleBigPlanet 3 sold $ 5.4 million as of February 2022. This makes this last title the biggest selling game in the series, but obviously Sony decided not to keep going.
The LittleBigPlanet games are a series of platformers with an emphasis on user created content. While LittleBigPlanet 3 itself is only one year older than Super Mario Maker on the Wii U, the franchise started all the way back in 2008 with the first LittleBigPlanet on the PlayStation 3.
While LittleBigPlanet certainly has its fans among the loyal Sony fanbase, and is an award winning series, it hasn’t really caught on, even with just that fanbase, to clinch Sackboy as PlayStation’s official mascot, a distinction that arguably belongs to Astro now. It’s certainly tempting to make the comparison to Nintendo’s creation franchise, but since it came first, it does have its own merits and place in video game history.
It’s been nearly a decade since the title was released, and even on the PlayStation 4, it’s unlikely that many of these levels were being played. Gamers who argue that the user created content on these games deserve to be preserved have a point, but it’s also true that sustaining these servers makes for an unnecessary expense, especially for a game company that works on making new online games and games with user creation features.
Once again, the comparison to Super Mario Maker looms, and so we will point out that Nintendo gave fair warning to their users when their game’s servers would go down, well in advance. This allowed fans to prepare and finish all user created levels for the title before Wii U’s online servers were taken down.
LittleBigPlanet users did not even get the chance to take any such actions. It’s likely that Sony’s security team made the decision internally, and the game studio had to share the decision after the fact.
As these fans have also noted, the way Sony made the games, the LittleBigPlanet 3 servers also had the user generated content from the first LittleBigPlanet games. They believe that the data has not been erased, but simply taken offline. That information may have been acquired through data mining. What they simply want now is access to that archive so that they can keep playing those levels.
So we don’t know if there really is still a way to get that data back, but when you see the way fans bemoan the loss of these archives in this online age, the game companies have to think about this when they’re making their future online titles, and their functionalities. It’s something that takes away from their enjoyment of games, and indeed, harms the culture of video games themselves.
