LittleBigPlanet 3’s servers remain offline “indefinitely,” meaning over a decade of user-made levels will be gone forever

it’s a sad moment littlebigplanet Fans, because the third game’s servers are now “offline indefinitely,” meaning a large part of the series may be lost forever.

Back in January, LittleBigPlanet 3’s servers were down due to some technical difficulties, although they were supposed to come back up at some point. Unfortunately, the official LittleBigPlanet Twitter account shared today that the servers will remain offline “indefinitely,” meaning over a decade of user-made levels may now be lost forever. “Due to ongoing technical issues that caused the PS4 version of LittleBigPlanet 3 servers to temporarily go offline in January 2024, we have decided to keep the servers offline indefinitely,” reads the statement announcing the servers being offline.

“All online services, including access to content created by other players for LittleBigPlanet 3, are no longer available. User-generated content (UGC) stored locally on PS4 will still be available. Any new UGC you create will be playable on PS4, but Not shareable. Offline features such as the campaign will still be playable, thank you for your support.”

In some cases, all levels from the original LittleBigPlanet and LittleBigPlanet 2 are playable in LittleBigPlanet 3, but the servers for both games have been shut down. This of course means that every level made by players since the release of the first game in 2008 is inaccessible unless you store it locally, as mentioned above.

It’s obviously a real shame, so much has been lost here, and you can probably tell from all the responses to the announcement that fans are pretty upset about it. LittleBigPlanet was arguably quite ahead of its time given the popularity of games like Fortnite and Roblox, both of which used user-generated content as a big part of why they were so successful (even if the latter has actually been around longer than LBP).

LittleBigPlanet 3 was released in November 2014 and was developed by Sumo Digital (not Media Molecule) to generally positive reviews. The most notable recent entry in the series, though, is Sackboy: A Big Adventure, which ditched user-created levels in favor of the usual platforming.