LittleBigPlanet: Now You Don’t Own What You’ve Created, Either

For several years now, we’ve had a running series of posts discussing how, when it comes to digital goods, you often don’t own what you’ve bought. This ugliness shows up with all kinds of content, including purchased movies, books, and shows on digital platforms. But it has reared its head acutely as of late in the video game industry. The way this goes is that a publisher releases a game in whole, people buy it, and at some later date the publisher decides to shut down backend servers that render the game partially or totally unplayable for those that bought it. This has the effect of deleting pieces of culture, a real problem for those interested in the preservation of this artform, and a real problem for the entire bargain that is copyright, where all that culture is eventually supposed to end up in the public domain.

But all of that is just on the topic of not owning what you’ve bought. With more games allowing for creative expression within them, spearheaded in part by titles like LittleBigPlanet, it’s also the case that you don’t own what you’ve created. Well, with the full shutdown of the LittleBigPlanet servers, all of the user-created content in the game is being whisked away along with the ability to purchase the game itself.

Sony has indefinitely decommissioned the PlayStation 4 servers for puzzle platformer LittleBigPlanet 3, the company announced in an update to one of its support pages. The permanent shutdown comes just months after the servers were temporarily taken offline due to ongoing issues. Fans now fear potentially hundreds of thousands of player creations not saved locally will be lost for good.

“Due to ongoing technical issues which resulted in the LittleBigPlanet 3 servers for PlayStation 4 being taken offline temporarily in January 2024, the decision has been made to keep the servers offline indefinitely,” Sony wrote in the update, first spotted by Delisted Games. “All online services including access to other players’ creations for LittleBigPlanet 3 are no longer available.”

Again, to be clear, the game will still work offline. And if users who created content saved that content locally, they’ll still have it. But many, many gamers saved their creations in the online game servers and used that online component to share what they created with other players. Sony spit out social media content to let the public know the servers were simply never coming back online. Absent from that communication was any plan, method, or capability for those who bought, played, and created content for the game to access any of that content. It’s just, poof, gone.

“Nearly 16 years worth of user generated content, millions of levels, some with millions of plays and hearts,” wrote one long-time player, Weeni-Tortellini, on Reddit in January. “Absolutely iconic levels locked away forever with no way to experience them again. To me, the servers shutting down is a hefty chunk bitten out of LittleBigPlanet’s history. I personally have many levels I made as a kid. Digital relics of what made me as creative as i am today, and The only access to these levels i have is thru the servers. I would be devastated if I could never experience them again.”

Then devastated ye shall be, it seems. I get that technical difficulties can arise. But come on, now. No backups? No way to restore the servers temporarily? Or would there be too much time, energy, and effort required precluding Sony from wanting to do that? We don’t know, because the company hasn’t said. Instead, all this content goes away by fiat, the customers who forked over money and put time into creating within the game be damned.

If companies like Sony are going to be so pernicious with their own centralized servers in this manner, the least they could do would be to instead move to some decentralized and/or user-driven hosting solution. You know, so that a decade’s worth of culture doesn’t simply go away on the whim of one company.