Sony Shuts Down Servers of Older LittleBigPlanet Games to Protect Fans
Sony has finally shut down the LittleBigPlanet 3 servers, which had remained inaccessible for months. Sadly, only the PlayStation 4 version of LittleBigPlanet 3 has been spared - the PS3 version and earlier installments lost their online features indefinitely to „protect the community”.
Sony fans certainly rejoiced at the recent presentation of games that are heading for PlayStation consoles. Unfortunately, now fans of one of the series from the Tokyo company have to swallow a bitter pill. The company has announced the final shutdown of servers for the LittleBigPlanet series after a wave of DDoS attacks. This includes the first installment (including the release on PlayStation Vita), sequel and LittleBigPlanet 3 for PS3. Only the servers for the latter game's PS4 release are available again thanks to the freshly released 1.27 update.
Online features in all games from the series had been disabled since May in response to a series of hacking attacks. These were allegedly the responsibility of a disgruntled fan who, as Eurogamer wrote back in March, was annoyed by the disrespectful treatment of the LittleBigPlanet franchise by Sony. The result was constant unavailability of servers, and later also offensive error messages displayed by the game (vide Reddit).
Sony has confirmed that over 10 million fan-created levels will still be available to check out in LittleBigPlanet 3 on PlayStation 4. Nevertheless, fans are bitter that the return of the servers comes at the price of a de facto blocking of online features in all other games from the series on older platforms, including the inability to earn missing trophies. A petition has even been launched to save those servers, but at the time of writing this news it hasn't gained much publicity.
