LittleBigPlanet 3’s servers are staying offline “indefinitely” meaning more than a decade’s worth of user-made levels are gone for good

It’s a sad time for LittleBigPlanet fans, as the third game’s servers are now “offline indefinitely” meaning a large portion of the series could be lost forever.

Back in January, the servers for LittleBigPlanet 3 went down due to some technical difficulties, though they were meant to come back at some point. Unfortunately, the official LittleBigPlanet Twitter account shared today that the servers are being kept offline “indefinitely,” meaning more than a decade’s worth of user-made levels are now probably lost forever. “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,” reads the statement announcing the servers are being kept offline.

“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.”

For some context, all levels from both the original LittleBigPlanet as well as LittleBigPlanet 2 were available to play in LittleBigPlanet 3, but both of those titles have already had their servers shut down. That of course means that every single level made by a player since 2008, when the first game released, is inaccessible, unless you have it stored locally, as mentioned above.

It’s obviously a real shame that so much is being lost here, and you can probably tell by all of the replies to the announcement that fans are quite upset about it. LittleBigPlanet was arguably quite ahead of its time, given the popularity of games like Fortnite and Roblox, both of which have user generated content as a big part of what makes them so successful (even if the latter has actually been around longer than LBP).

LittleBigPlanet 3 was released in November, 2014, developed by Sumo Digital as opposed to Media Molecule, and was generally received well. The most notable recent entry in the series, though, is Sackboy: A Big Adventure, which abandoned the user created levels in favour of your usual platformer affair.