LittleBigPlanet has been nearly unplayable for a long time, and no one has said why

For the LittleBigPlanet community, one thing is clear: none of the core games in the series are currently running, and haven’t been for some time. Very little beyond that fact is very clear at all. The series’ small but dedicated group of remaining players have been left in the dark about why major sections of LittleBigPlanets 1, 2, and 3 are unplayable, who’s responsible, and when everything will be fixed. It’s a situation that addresses the larger issue of online game preservation, and when a community no longer seems to be valuable enough to the companies running their games.

LittleBigPlanet servers went down in early March. Their single-player campaigns remain playable, and users can create their own levels, but they can no longer upload or download levels – the cornerstone of LittleBigPlanet, especially several years after its release. They also cannot play with friends or access the in-game store. The three LittleBigPlanet console games are linked, with LittleBigPlanet 3 players theoretically able to download levels created for the first game; The unfortunate side effect of this open approach is that when servers go down for one part, they go down for all three.

Servers remain inaccessible as I write, and messages about server repairs have been rare. On March 12, the Twitter accounts of LittleBigPlanet, LittleBigPlanet 3 developer Sumo Digital, and Sony SIE studio XDev all mentioned that the servers were being taken down due to “technical difficulties.” On March 31, the LittleBigPlanet Twitter account went on to say that the team was working to “get the servers back online as soon as possible,” with XDev Product Development Manager Pete Smith adding that “it’s not possible. -may not be today, but it’s close. Fansite LBP Union even reported that the game was briefly playable in full that day, albeit with some lag – but the servers were down again before too long.

The last we heard from the team came on April 16th, with a message stating: “We are still working on the LBP server issues. It is taking us longer than we hoped but we are making progress and Will let everyone know as soon as we have more info. Thanks for being so patient :).”

The screen that welcomes LittleBigPlanet 3 players who want to play online now.

In speaking with several members of the show’s community, I’ve heard a number of guesses and theories as to how and why this happened in the first place. Many pointed to a single wronged member of the community, talked about stolen server keys, and claimed that thousands of unwanted levels were downloaded at once as a DDOS attack to cripple servers. Others refuse to believe these theories, believing that more prosaic reasons are to blame, based more on a lack of support for games as they age.

Nothing can be proven either way, as no party involved in the LittleBigPlanet interview has made any meaningful comments on the matter, other than to acknowledge that there is one. IGN understands series creator MediaMolecule is no longer involved in any element of LittleBigPlanet’s ongoing operations, leaving its new developers and editors in a position to answer questions – though none of them ever have. really done. LittleBigPlanet’s Community Manager did not respond to multiple requests for comment from IGN, Sumo Digital was similarly silent, and Sony Interactive Entertainment answered several questions about the issue with a simple statement, lacking in detail:

“We are aware of the server issues with LittleBigPlanet and are working to resolve the issue and bring the servers back online. We’ll keep you updated on progress and appreciate your continued patience as we work to resolve the issue.

This stony silence around exactly what happened has left members of the community wondering (and worrying about) not when, but if they will ever be able to play creative platforms again.

The stony silence has left community members wondering (and worrying about) not when, but if they will ever be able to play again.

I asked LBP player JakeLamba what brought him back to the game so long after his release, and their response sounds like a very common sentiment. “A few months ago I started poring over the PS3 again, just for fun, and when I saw LittleBigPlanet on the PS3 game store, a flood of forgotten memories came flooding back. I just remembered all the amazing times I had in the game and how instrumental it was in fostering the creativity in me as a kid. Even if it’s not just nostalgia that keeps bringing me back. I honestly think the game series is sleeping. The games have so much charm in them.

Another community member, Redshift-TTV agrees, “As a kid, playing LBP1 on my PS3 for the first time was magical. It felt like the game was on a whole different level than the rest. The game had the perfect feel of childhood, arts and crafts. Really feeding our growing imaginations at the time. “

Players return or have simply continued to play LittleBigPlanet games due to the memories attached to them and their relatively unique format – only the Mario Maker series truly matches LittleBigPlanet in profile and approach. One user even says he now plays with his own child, having played it himself in 2008. “It’s a great creative outlet for my child who loves creating levels to express feelings, thoughts or thoughts. ideas,” says 0niongirl. “I feel so sad that a game that I love and my child now loves is slowly disappearing.”

Just as we’ve seen with console generations, there are also player generations, and LittleBigPlanet’s remaining active player base remains tied to the series as it feels like it belongs in a bygone era. LittleBigPlanet’s generation was part of the vanguard of massively online console gaming, and an early success in ‘shareable’ content for PlayStation – and it’s that mix of age, server dependency and contribution players which makes the current situation so difficult for the fans to take.

If increasing digitization is a concern for those interested in game preservation, games that rely on online user-generated content should be treated as an endangered species. Games like LittleBigPlanet are, for the most part, built with an invisible countdown, ticking down to the moment when the balance shifts from “community support is worth it” to “community support is financially inefficient”. As a community shrinks over time, it will inevitably reach a point where those paying to keep the lights on simply don’t see the value in the few remaining players, no matter how passionate.

Some members of the LittleBigPlanet community are extremely realistic about the eventual fate of the game: “LittleBigPlanet is an incredibly old game,” says JakeLamba, “where even the last installment came out 7 years ago, so expect that that they regularly maintain and maintain the servers is in my opinion unrealistic.

But from what we can see, LittleBigPlanet suffers from these effects pretty early on. The games don’t seem to be down because Sony or Sumo decided it was time to shut them down once and for all, though the complete silence on the support side isn’t helping to allay that concern. Instead, they’re stuck in some sort of limbo, just waiting for the servers to come back up. There’s a powerlessness to it – you own the game, which should work, and yet you’re completely unable to use it as intended, without anyone telling you why.

It’s not isolated to LittleBigPlanet. TheGamer recently reported that Titanfall on PC has been functionally unplayable for years due to hackers, posting racist abuse and forcibly logging out those who come to play for legitimate reasons. Developer Respawn and publisher EA apparently haven’t responded to queries from the small remaining community, presumably for the same reasons that the game’s servers will, one day, inevitably be shut down – it’s just not a profitable use. of the time of a support.

There’s a powerlessness to it – you own the game, which should work, and yet you’re completely unable to use it as intended, without anyone telling you why.

Where server attacks and outages in newer games resolve naturally, in legacy games like Titanfall and LittleBigPlanet, the silence can be hard to break. It’s no surprise that once the Titanfall community story hit a wider audience, Respawn promised fixes. In the case of LittleBigPlanet, the community organized, created a #SaveLBP hashtag and contacted the media once they realized what had happened.

“I think this move saved LBP from being ignored indefinitely or for longer than we already expected,” Redshift-TTV tells me. JakeLamba agrees: “I really think the servers we’re working on are due to fan outcry and media coverage. Without it, there would have been a very good chance that they were just going to stop and end the LBP games.

But even all these efforts have only led to an acknowledgment of the problem. In the case of Titanfall and LittleBigPlanet, no patch has been finalized and no timeline has been given for it. There are signs as I write that LittleBigPlanet may be starting to come back online, with some users reporting that they were able to log in (even though I myself couldn’t) – but even if and when the servers return, the silence around this issue does not inspire hope for the inevitable moment when LittleBigPlanet is deemed less of a need to fix.

It brings up the inherent problem of being a devoted fan of an older, web-focused game. Whatever your passion, your hobby is under someone else’s control, especially when someone else has historically shut down fan efforts to keep it alive in a new form. This will probably only be the beginning of this problem. Less than two decades ago, we entered an era of increasingly online gaming; about a decade later, we entered an era where many of these games would become digital-only; now we’re entering a period where many, or most, of those older games no longer hold value to those who hold the keys to run them, with those same people reluctant to hand over the keys to those who would like to keep them the games live on their own.

Right now, a group of LittleBigPlanet gamers are part of an unwitting first wave of this movement – and they just want to know why they can’t play their chosen games. Nobody tells them.