PlayStation exclusive permanently taken offline without warning, players lose years of content

A beloved PlayStation-exclusive has been taken offline permanently, with players losing access to loads of created content.

The trouble with online support for gaming is it can’t last forever, as connections to online servers costs money and requires maintenance to keep running.

Have you binge-watched the Fallout show, fancy playing the games but don’t know where to start? We’ve got you covered in the below video.

Now, PlayStation fans are mourning the loss of online connectivity for LittleBigPlanet 3, a beloved platformer that's been taken offline indefinitely at the time of writing.

According to Wario64 on Twitter, the servers had gone down once before sometime in January 2024, reportedly due to technical issues.

Now the servers are gone for good, and the worst thing is it’s taken loads of player-created content with it, all of which is no longer accessible.

Player-creations were a wide variety of levels made by fans of the game, which could then be uploaded to the server for all to play, providing near-endless amounts of content to enjoy.

Unfortunately, that’s all gone now, which is especially heartbreaking considering there was almost no warning to the server takedown, nor any effort to try to preserve the creations players made.

Commenting on Wario64’s post about the shutdown, one fan sarcastically said, “Game preservation sure is awesome,” with a little smiley-face emoji.

Another commenter called out PlayStation directly, saying, “[You] gotta love PlayStation and their non-stop consumer friendly tactics.”

Someone else said the shutdown “sets a bad precedent for other games,” many of which will probably share the same fate when developers/publishers get tired of supporting them.

It’s a dire loss for LittleBigPlanet fans, which still has a pretty strong active playerbase despite the games being somewhat dated, at least for the time being.