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Following nearly a year of being plagued by hackers and server issues, and months of downtime as developers worked on the problems, a majority of the older LittleBigPlanet servers are now shut down permanently. The official LittleBigPlanet Twitter account put out a statement announcing that LittleBigPlanet 1-3 on PS3, and LittleBigPlanet PS Vita have been closed for good. This decision follows countless issues with the servers that at times led to hate speech being displayed via in-game messages by hackers, among a variety of other problems. The LittleBigPlanet 3 PS4 servers are back online, however, which at least preserves the more than 10 million user-generated levels from across the main series.
An update on the LittleBigPlanet server and online services: pic.twitter.com/vUrvHcZvIs
— Sackboy: A Big Adventure | LittleBigPlanet (@LittleBigPlanet) September 13, 2021
This decision comes after developers worked for months to resolve issues stemming from malicious scripts that could do anything from crashing the servers to displaying hateful messages in-game. While players can still access all of the community levels via LBP 3 PS4, as well as upload newly created levels there, the server shutdown means the series on PS3 and Vita is now limited to the single-player campaign and locally created levels only. Players can no longer upload or download new levels from those games.
The shutdown statement in full reads:
LittleBigPlanet Service Update
Hello
Firstly, we would like to apologise for the extended downtime of the LittleBigPlanet server and want to thank you all for your patience whilst we work on this issue.
The Good news is that we have just launched Game Update 1.27 and brought the LittleBigPlanet server (and all 10,000,000+ Community Levels!!) back online for PlayStation 4 users!
Unfortunately, we need to permanently shut down our online services for: LittleBigPlanet, LittleBigPlanet 2, LittleBigPlanet 3 (PS3) and LittleBigPlanet PS Vita.
We have no doubt that 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.
Thank you for being a wonderful community and for your continued love and support of all things Sackboy.
The team has further clarified a couple of big points to this:
- Any community content previously published to our server via LBP1/LBP2/LBP3 on PlayStation 3 will still be available on LittleBigPlanet 3 on PlayStation 4.
- You can still play the Story Modes and Level Pack DLC of LBP1, LBP2 and LBP3 on PlayStation 3 in single player or local co-op.
However, it’s not all bad news. While the ultimate solution to the problem was to shutdown the older LittleBigPlanet servers, this does mean that the LBP 3 servers on PS4 are back up and running. It remains to be seen if those will still be plagued with any of the previous problems, but it seems that, at least for the time being, the LittleBigPlanet community can at least be happy that the server issues have come to some kind of resolution after almost a year of problems and downtime, even if that means the PS3 and Vita games’ servers had to close their doors for good.