Sony has officially confirmed that the game’s servers have been shut down indefinitely, which doesn’t mean they’ll stay that way, so maybe they’ll get around to making them work again, since the lifespan is mainly up to the creativity of the players… but maybe we’re hoping in vain.

Sony has stated on its website that the temporary server shutdown initiated in January will remain in place for the foreseeable future. With this decision, new players will be cut off from the more than ten million maps, because that’s how much UGC (user-generated content) there is for LittleBigPlanet 3. The reason? Ongoing technical issues.

Locally saved UGC is playable because it doesn’t require a server connection. So if you’ve downloaded some maps and haven’t deleted them, you can still access them even if the servers are down. Sony has also pointed out the offline features, so fortunately this is not a game that has become completely unplayable without servers (this was the case with Ubisoft’s The Crew, and will soon be the case with Electronic Arts’ Need For Speed 2015…).

The servers for the first three episodes of LittleBigPlanet on PlayStation 3 were shut down by Sony back in 2021, and now the PlayStation 4 version has run into the same problem. It’s not that old a game, though, as LittleBigPlanet was released for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 in 2014. In February 2017, Sony said that more than ten million maps had been created in the game, but who knows how many users have created since then, so the final number is anyone’s guess.

So unless you have a UGC downloaded to your console, you can only experience the story of LittleBigPlanet 3, which will take seven and a half, maybe eight hours to complete. It’s not that much, but in theory it was just a starting point for users to create something more permanent. They became so persistent that they are now lost.

Source: IGN, Sony