As many avid fans of LittleBigPlanet have noted, LittleBigPlanet's companion site, LBP.me, has vanished from the Internet without a trace. With more questions than answers, LittleBigPlanet's community is now left without a way to view updates to their recent activity, comments, and even the only means of blocking other players in the game. What happened to LBP.me and LittleBigPlanet.com, and where do we go from here?
LBP.me Goes Down
LBP.me went down sometime around November 23rd, 2020 according to the earliest tweets I could find. Here is another example from that date.
However, Steven Isbell, LittleBigPlanet's community manager responded with his branded @LittleBigPlanet Twitter account on November 25th to questions about LBP.me's downtime:
We don't have any plans to shut down the LittleBigPlaner servers.
LBP.me is just down for some general maintenance and updates.
For two months, official sources were silent on the nature of what has been going on with the website. However, on January 19th, 2021, Steven Isbell responded on Twitter with the following message:
We're still actively investigating the issues with LBP.me, will update as soon as I have some more information.
This suggests that there is something currently wrong with the website that the LittleBigPlanet team is struggling to fix. This makes it even more unclear when the website will come back online.
Extended Downtime
LBP.me has been down for 68 days since this post was last updated, about three months. It's clear that the downtime has gone beyond "general maintenance and updates."
Speculation
With no official word on what specifically is being done with the site and with Steven Isbell and PlayStation remaining silent on the issue, little can be done besides speculation. Despite their silence on the issue, the length of time that LBP.me has been offline has led many to conclude that LBP.me will not be returning at all. However, some others have speculated that the downtime suggests that a fourth official title, LittleBigPlanet 4, may be on the horizon.
LittleBigPlanet.com Redirected to PlayStation Domain
Curiously, LittleBigPlanet.com has been redirected to an official LittleBigPlanet 3 website on PlayStation's domain. This is an interesting move since there is no longer a centralized website for the LittleBigPlanet franchise. However, if you happen to find one, I encourage you to leave a comment.
Killzone.com Retired
It appears that LBP.me is not the only PlayStation website to have been shut down recently. Killzone.com was shut down sometime earlier this month. The earliest tweet I could find reporting this event was on January 8th. According to the website, Killzone.com has been retired and will be redirected to PlayStation's official website. This has left players unable to create or manage clans in Shadow Falls. This is a similar predicament to players in LittleBigPlanet being unable to adjust their profile comment privacy settings and block features.
Godofwar.com
The website for the popular PlayStation series God of War, Godofwar.com, has been redirected to the PlayStation domain https://godofwar.playstation.com/. However, unlike the currently dead LBP.me and retired Killzone.com websites, the God of War website has been fully redirected to the PlayStation domain.
What This Means For LBP.me
Again, I will preface this with a disclaimer: I do not have the answers. This is merely guided speculation based on recent events, and the true answer may be widely different. The redirection of LittleBigPlanet.com, Killzone.com and Godofwar.com to PlayStation's domain suggests that Sony Computer Entertainment desires to bring its IPs under their more direct umbrella.
Imagine a future where all PlayStation video game websites can be found with a PlayStation domain. Currently, godofwar.playstation.com is a great example of this. Imagine littlebigplanet.playstation.com as being the natural successor of littlebigplanet.com in this scenario. This website could potentially replace LBP.me and littlebigplanet.com entirely.
Whether or not this will bring better features to access LittleBigPlanet on the web, I can only guess.
An Optimistic Future for LBP.me
In a best case scenario, a new LittleBigPlanet website under PlayStation's domain would preserve all the features of LBP.me and expand upon them. We might see expanded comment support, perhaps even the ability to add comments to levels and profiles on the web, as well as better comment management. The ability to manage levels from the web could also improve, allowing creators to edit the names and descriptions of levels. The ability to see more than 100 pages of comments would also be extremely beneficial for the LBP Union Wiki, as it would allow us to more easily explore and archive events that occurred more than ten years ago.
It's also possible that a new LittleBigPlanet website could add features like better support for photos. An uploaded photo export feature would be a game changer for archival projects. While I think this is unlikely, it would make downloading user-generated stickers much easier. Uploading images in LittleBigPlanet and downloading them on LBP.me was a popular way of exporting images from the game.
The End of LittleBigPlanet Online
Although Steven Isbell assured us in his tweet that there were no plans to shut down the LittleBigPlanet servers, it's important to consider that this decision is not up to him. It's entirely possible that PlayStation and Sony are considering shutting down the LittleBigPlanet servers. This isn't new for LittleBigPlanet. On July 31st, 2016, servers for LittleBigPlanet shut down in Japan. Servers for LittleBigPlanet PSP shut down worldwide as well, with LittleBigPlanet Karting shutting down soon thereafter on August 31st.
While there is no official indication that a LittleBigPlanet server shutdown is being planned, it isn't totally out of the question. The original LittleBigPlanet was first released 12 years ago on October 27th, 2008. Although statistics on the number of active players on the original game and its sequels are hard to come by, it's reasonable to guess that there may not be enough players of the original game to warrant paying for expensive server uptime.
However, PlayStation has kept online support active for much longer in the past. PlayStation 2 only lost online support on March 31st, 2016, meaning that PlayStation 2 had online servers for nearly 20 years.
Archiving LittleBigPlanet
Although it's possible that LittleBigPlanet servers may return with more advanced emulation in the years to come, LBP.me's disappearance has made it all the more important to archive what currently exists on LittleBigPlanet's servers operated by PlayStation. Levels, creations, comments, profiles, and photos that are uploaded to these servers will vanish forever once PlayStation inevitably decides to shut down the servers. While it is tradition to inform customers of the shutdowns in advance, LBP.me's sudden and unexplained downtime suggests that the day that LittleBigPlanet's servers shut down could be sooner and more abrupt than expected.
If players want to preserve their creations and interactions online, they need to work swiftly to back up their profiles to save their creations, costumes, photos, levels, and more. If players are interested in saving comments and uploaded photos, they may need to explore their options to gather screenshots and video recordings. This is especially important for preserving the history of LittleBigPlanet Clans.
Keep Tweeting
I encourage you to keep tweeting at not only Steven Isbell and the branded @LittleBigPlanet Twitter account about LBP.me, but also @AskPlaystation. Also, please do not take out any of your frustrations on Steven. I have been happy to see that people have not begun to berate or harass him on the subject. Most people have been very polite. It isn't his fault, and I expect that he may not even know what's going on with LBP.me as it is likely out of his hands.
Thank you for reading, and please do me a favor and share this post with other fans of LittleBigPlanet to keep them more informed about what's going on with LBP.me and LittleBigPlanet.com.