Developers Sumo Digital took to social media on Monday to announce that it would be permanently shutting down the online services for most of its LittleBigPlanet titles. This includes LittleBigPlanet, LittleBigPlanet 2, LittleBigPlanet 3 on PS3, and the LittleBigPlanet for the PlayStation Vita.
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After being down for an extended time, the company apologized and noted that a new game update has been launched, and the return of the LittleBigPlanet server and its 10,000,000 or so community levels were back online. However, they also confirmed that they would be needing to shut down the online services for a few games.
An update on the LittleBigPlanet server and online services: pic.twitter.com/vUrvHcZvIs
— Sackboy: A Big Adventure | LittleBigPlanet (@LittleBigPlanet) September 13, 2021
“Unfortunately, we need to permanently shut down our online services for: LittleBigPlanet, LittleBigPlanet 2, LittleBigPlanet 3 (PS3) and LittleBigPlanet PS Vita,” the company said in a statement. “We have no doubt this news will come as a big disappointment to a lot of you, ultimately this is the best way to protect the LittleBigPlanet community and to help ensure that our online environment remains safe.”
LittleBigPlanet has been going through a tough time for most of 2021, with the servers going down in early March and having remained off, with little explanation as to why, until this most recent announcement from Sumo Digital. While the single-player campaigns remained available, the ability to upload or download levels was gone, cutting off a huge aspect of the LittleBigPlanet series.
It’s still unknown as to what caused the initial service outage or why it took so long to get the game back to a working state, but a report from IGN earlier this year notes that several theories have popped up within the LittleBigPlanet community, including DDOS attacks from angry fans, all the way to more simple explanations that are less nefarious in nature. Whatever the reason is, it seems as if Sumo Digital and Sony Interactive Entertainment have decided that the best course of action was to just update the game and then cease online services for the titles.
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Fortunately for fans worried about losing any of their levels, Sumo Digital confirmed that any community content previously published to their servers via any of the three original LittleBigPlanet games on PlayStation 3 would be available on LittleBigPlanet 3 on PlayStation 4 (which is one of the many backwards compatible titles on PS5, as well). Likewise, Story Modes and Level Pack DLCs for all three games will still be available in both single-player or co-op modes.
