Sony's mistreatment of the LittleBigPlanet series is straight up appalling

i'm sure it's easy to view this news as just one sign of Sony treating the series like crap; but the truth is that they've been treating the series like crap for over a decade now. LittleBigPlanet 3 was an extremely botched game just in its own right and it's largely thanks to them. and Sony has been shutting servers for the game series down since 2016.

i think it'd be fair to call myself an LBP veteran; i've been playing the game since about 2010 when LittleBigPlanet 1 and PSP were out. i was very young back then, and i didn't have the money to pick up a home console, so i mostly stuck to handhelds like the PSP. my parents got me LittleBigPlanet for it; i was considering selling it off because i thought it was too childish, before giving it a shot when i was bored one day, after which it quickly became one of my favourite games, even in its limited PSP form. eventually the PS Vita got a version of the game too, so i ended up moving to that console instead; at the time, it was still cheaper than getting a PS3. i became very active on a plethora of fan forums for the game like LittleBigPlanet Central, which were the place to get your custom levels and creations noticed by the community. i met some of my earliest internet friends through those communities! this was back when Skype still was a thing, so since it was more convenient to use that than PSN, i'd add some of my friends on there so we could more easily coordinate working on custom levels together.

starting with LBP2/LBPV, the series also featured a music sequencer that allowed people to score music for their levels using a set of preset instruments; it was quite complex for being just an ingame music tool, and i ended up making some of my earliest songs with it! i got involved with some of the music communities present around the game and so thankfully every single song i have made in the game(s) has previously been recorded and archived (though, please don't look it up, since it was all under my deadname!)

while the handheld versions were relegated to several different development teams, the two main games in the series were developed by the British studio Media Molecule. i don't know if it's realistic to call them or LBP "indie", since LBP was one of the biggest sellers of the PS3 after all, but i don't really know how else to describe the vibes that people got from LittleBigPlanet and the developers behind it. the LittleBigPlanet series oozed with personality, from its crafted-together visuals down to the games sound design and OSTs; everything about it was designed to come across as humble and friendly and DIY in a way that really made the player feel like they were a part of the game, and that inspired them to get out there and make things! i remember Media Molecule's developers being very closely linked with LBP's community, down to the point where i recall several users in the community openly dreaming of becoming a part of their team and working there, and some community members even taking trips to their office to hang out with the devs and have fun together. it's safe to say they were doing something special with LittleBigPlanet.

at some point, rumours started spreading of a third entry in the mainline LBP series, which would later become LittleBigPlanet 3 (obviously). Media Molecule at that time had signed off on working on LittleBigPlanet, wanting to focus more on other titles which resulted in Tearaway (2014) and Dreams (2020). mainline LBP would now be handed off to a different developer for the first time in the series. this ended up being Sumo Digital, who i believe had previously worked on some DLC packs for the games.

everyone in the community was curious to find out whether they could live up to the task of succeeding Media Molecule; LittleBigPlanet 2 was already a perfect game, so what more could possibly be added to it? we'd soon find out, as the closed beta for the game was being hosted through LittleBigPlanet Central; i ended up brazenly saying that if i got selected, i'd literally buy a PS3 so i could participate in the beta, and lo and behold i made it in! to this day, it's the only closed beta i've ever participated in, and that did feel very special to me.

however, the closed beta was. um. bad. like really bad.

LBP3 was rushed to release by Sony and it wasn't very good

the closed beta was held in August 2014, just a couple of months before the game came out. the very first thing me and many others noticed was the absolutely painful loading times on PS3; it could take up to two whole minutes to even load into the main menu, something which would only take a couple of seconds in LBP2, which this game was completely based upon. the second thing everyone noticed was that stickers didn't work. you couldn't place them on anything. there were plenty of other bugs that i can't remember anymore, but this one specifically really stuck out. if you've played the game before, you'd know that being able to decorate literally anything in the game with stickers is one of the core features of the game, and just a couple of months away from launch it didn't even work yet.

beta testers for any of the games in the series would receive a character customization item known as the Beta Test Vest. it's been a decade and i still have never recieved mine >:( it's honestly one of the many things that i think goes to show how poorly coordinated this whole thing was.

LittleBigPlanet 3 would launch in November 2014, to... plenty of positive reviews, but also a lot more mixed ones than the game series had ever been given before. from day one, the game was riddled with bugs; some of these were so game-breaking that they would corrupt your savedata entirely, or they'd hardlock the game into a state where you couldn't progress through the storymode and you'd have to reset your savefile completely to be able to play through everything. not to mention, the long loading times were still there. many bugs me and my friends found during the closed beta weren't patched out and got shipped at launch.

LittleBigPlanet 3 was a rushed mess of the game. everyone in the community will tell you this was the direct result of Sony, who allegedly kept pushing for a Q4 release date, even though the game really required a lot more polish in order to be good.

the bugs that rendered the game in an unplayable state were bad enough, but i personally don't even think that's LittleBigPlanet 3's biggest issue. while i assume most of the bugs were at least patched out, what can't change is the most fundamental flaw with the game, which is that it suffers from an enormous amount of feature creep. LBP1 was centered around this handmade, hand-crafted style, and simple to understand mechanics, which really helped players feel like even they could participate in the act of creation without needing to understand rocket science first. LBP2 expanded greatly on all of this, by adding microchips and logic gates to the toolkit in the game; now, users who wanted to could learn rudimentary videogame programming all within the game itself! i think Media Molecule really understood the principle of limitations inspiring creativity; even when adding completely new features in the mix, they still sought to keep things simple so that anyone could understand them.

LittleBigPlanet is a 2.5d platformer. the player can move freely between the X and Y directions, but is stuck to only three different layers of Z movement. when the player jumps above the edge of a block, they're automatically snapped onto that block unless there is a hazard on it. what that means is that you could create some really unique platforming levels that would treat this layer snapping as its own mechanic, where you'd have to avoid holes in walls and other obstacles to avoid being snapped to the wrong layer and stuff like that. there's literally no other game that has done this that i know of! you'd have to get very creative to make the most out of those three gameplay layers.

Sumo Digital said: nah, fuck it, let's make it 16 layers.

it's a bigger number, it sounds good on paper, but gameplay-wise it just worked really poorly. the platforming mechanics weren't originally designed around so many layers you could switch between. so instead, the developers added rails. and portals. and special bounce pads that would launch you from the foreground all the way to the background. they added in new logic chips that would allow the player to freely move between layers like it was a 3D game instead, so the layer mechanics didn't matter anymore if you used those in your levels. they added three new characters with different movement mechanics to make things less boring. they added a tool that would allow the player to make any kind of powerup they wanted to with any decoration item they wanted to. they added all of these new features that nobody asked for. in my opinion, the game just became too... big. it was just BigPlanet now. it wasn't arts and crafts anymore, it wasn't disassembling and putting back an old TV to learn about electronics anymore. suddenly there were all these features that were intended to break the game free from the simplicity and user-friendliness it was known for. it's like they catered to all the 10 year olds asking "omg MM can we pwease have 300 layers"; they made a game full of new features that sounded exciting enough to get you to buy the game, only to realize after a few days that none of those new features were really thought out at all and didn't really have any longevity to them. i feel like all these poor design decisions just made the game so much less down to earth than its predecessors, and that hurt the games accessibility a whole lot. honestly, i spent more time going back to LittleBigPlanet 2 than i ever did playing LittleBigPlanet 3.

but despite all its flaws, it eventually became the only LittleBigPlanet game in the series that was still available to play.

Sony turns LBP into mascot slop

Sony's slow erosion of the LittleBigPlanet series started to become even more noticeable in 2016; just two years after the launch of LBP3, the game's Japanese servers were inexplicably shut down. the community was alltogether just extremely confused at this news; Japan did have a very active community who all made extremely elaborate levels for the game, and just two years after the game launched, they were already being shut out of it completely. this obviously wasn't a good sign.

LittleBigPlanet PS Vita, LBP2, and the PS3 version of LBP3 all simultaneously had their servers shut down in 2021. the servers for these games got hacked, specifically by a hacker who managed to display messages in the main menu of the game deadnaming someone and spreading transphobic hatred. the servers had previously suffered from a series of DDoS attacks, and this was the final nail in the coffin for Sony who didn't want to take any risks with their property being used to display something that made them look bad. it would've cost more to fix the servers and maintain them properly than to keep them online, so they were taken down completely. if you were a Vita user you were out of luck; all community content ever created for the game was now gone. if you played these games on PS3, you were also out of luck; however, no need to worry, because the LBP3 PS4 servers were still up! you could still access every LBP1/LBP2/LBP3 level through there.

those are the servers that were permanently shut down by Sony today. they've been indefinitely down since the start of this year, and today that has become permanent.

meanwhile, Sumo Digital went on to develop Sackboy: A Big Adventure for PS4/PS5, which launched in late 2020. it's officially not part of the LittleBigPlanet series, which is good, as it has no real right to be; it's a top-down mascot platformer.

Sackboy, the main character in the LBP series, is practically a genderless little dude who serves as a canvas (heck, literally) for the player to put any clothes and accessories they like on. while level creation was LBP's main focus, another huge aspect of its user-generated content were "costumes", outfits that other users would create for their Sackpeople and share with eachother through levels where you could collect them. with the massive success of the LittleBigPlanet series, Sackboy effectively became a mascot for Sony. they now had their own platform hero that could go on to rival the likes of Sonic and Mario. Sackboy represented creativity; whereas Sega and Nintendo only gave you a strictly curated series of unchanging, rigid levels to play through, Sony on the other hand now had this fancy, dynamic physics platformer that put the tools in your hands! no wonder they were so quick to show Sackboy off everywhere.

now the only remaining legacy of the LittleBigPlanet series is the very opposite of what Sackboy once represented, an unchanging, rigid mascot platformer — granted, i haven't played it because it was clear to me it's nothing like the rest of the series, so i never bothered. Sony has done their very best to smudge out one of the most creative and inspiring game series of all time and convert it into mascot slop. they don't want to deal with the history of their quirky mascot platformer once giving any form of power to the consumer and making them the driving force behind the product. they want to be the only driving force behind the product. and so they've quietly been scrubbing the series away, erasing literal millions of artworks, songs, levels, and costumes in the process.

i'll point everyone reading this to LBP Union, who have been hard at work operating and maintaining private servers for the mainline LBP games and LBPV. i don't really have any experience with them as i haven't played LBP in ages, but they do appear to be fulfilling the monumental task of preserving this series and keeping its online functionality alive and future-proofed. unlike Sony.

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