Sony has just recently updated its online support page in Europe and confirmed what LittleBigPlanet fans have feared since early in 2024. Similar to the abuse seen in 2021 that brought the PlayStation 3 game’s online features down, another wave of attacks hit the PlayStation 4 version in January and online features were “temporarily” suspended once again. Sadly that temporary takedown has now become permanent and LittleBigPlanet 3 will not be coming back online at all.
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.
PlayStation Decommissioned Servers page update
Fan of the site and frequent commenter, Jeff Blanch, gave us an update on the situation just a few weeks ago which I unfortunately lost track of after being in the hospital again. Although there wasn’t a chance to warn users to download community creations ahead of time, since the servers were already “temporarily” offline, he does sum up the loss rather well:
“If LBP3 on PS4 is shut down, which is certainly looking plausible at the very least, all of the levels that were created over the years by users, probably numbering in at least the hundreds of thousands easy, will all be gone for good (unless they were locally saved). This is a gaming tragedy. I really don’t see Sony (and Sumo Digital, LBP3’s developer) attempting to save LBP again (not that they tried very hard the first time around). Just terrible news. Wanted to fill you all in.”
The loss itself is tragic, spanning 15 years of user-generated content across the series, but it’s especially crushing that there was no chance to try and preserve the last of it after the “temporary” downtime. Fortunately, fans and modders have once again been on the ball, collecting content over the years at Little Big Archive. It’s not the intended experience of browsing levels through your in-game Pod and it’ll require quite a bit of work to set things up but it’s at least a silver lining to the terrible inevitability of this day.
Thanks to Needles078 for pointing out the news on this today.