Sony abruptly takes classic LittleBigPlanet servers offline

It’s been a troubled year for LittleBigPlanet servers already, and now it looks like things are getting worse. The servers for the classic LittleBigPlanet games have been offline for much of the year, frustrating those looking to play classic games on PS3 and LittleBigPlanet 3 on PlayStation 4. Today, Sony brought the LittleBigPlanet servers back online, but they’re missing support for a bunch of games in the franchise.

Specifically, Sony announced on Twitter that while the LittleBigPlanet server is back for PlayStation 4 players, it’s gone for good for all of the PlayStation 3 games as well as LittleBigPlanet for PS Vita. As you can likely imagine, the abrupt, permanent shutdown of those servers isn’t sitting well with fans who were looking forward to playing those titles once again.

“Firstly, we would like to apologize for the extended downtime of the LittleBigPlanet server and want to thank you all for your patience whilst we worked on this issue,” the LittleBigPlanet team said in a statement to Twitter today. “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.”

Then came the bad news: “Unfortunately, we need to permanently shut down our online services for: LittleBigPlanet, LittleBigPlanet 2, LittleBigPlanet 3 (PS3), and LittleBigPlanet PS Vita,” the statement continued. The LittleBigPlanet team noted that while it realizes this will be a “big disappointment” to a lot of LittleBigPlanet players, it is “the best way to protect the LittleBigPlanet community and to help ensure that our environment remains safe.”

In follow-up tweets, Sony confirmed that any community content published for the first three LBP games on PS3 will still be playable in LittleBigPlanet 3 for PS4, and that the story modes and level pack DLCs for PS3 games are still playable in single-player and local co-op. So, while it’s good that community-made levels for LittleBigPlanet games will live on in LittleBigPlanet 3 for PS4, that’s little comfort to those who still regularly played the first three LBP games on PS3 before these server woes started earlier in the year.

Indeed, in response to those tweets, there are a lot of players expressing frustration with the fact that they didn’t get in one final play session with these games. Those fans are also unsurprisingly upset that Sony didn’t give any prior warning about the shutdown. Still, with Sony describing these decisions as permanent, there probably isn’t going to be a reverse-course on this.