LittleBigPlanet Fan Initiative Ends Amid DDoS Attack Claims and Controversy

Alright, let’s dive into this wild situation surrounding LittleBigPlanet 3. In April 2024, Sony and Sumo Digital dropped the bombshell that the servers for the PlayStation 4 version of LittleBigPlanet 3 would be permanently shut down. This came right after a “temporary” shutdown in January 2024, which the official LittleBigPlanetX account blamed on “a number of issues.” Those issues turned out to be the same DDoS attacks that had previously targeted the PlayStation 3 version of the game.

LittleBigPlanet 3 was the last iteration of the series with online capabilities, as the PlayStation Vita servers had already gone offline back in 2021. Given that the series thrives on user-generated content, fans have been eager to find a way to host private servers since the online support for LittleBigPlanet 3 was cut.

On March 3, a well-known content creator in the LittleBigPlanet community, Ayee, announced LBPOnline. This project promised a way to access privately hosted servers by downloading a file to a USB drive and plugging it into your PlayStation 4 or 5, all without needing to jailbreak your console.

Ayee indicated that LBPOnline would officially launch on May 4, but that date has come and gone without a trace of the project. So, what went wrong? A post on the r/littlebigplanet subreddit sheds some light on the situation.

In the lead-up to LBPOnline’s release, the community turned against Ayee. The post claimed that Ayee and another user, known as Epic, were involved in the DDoS attacks that had taken down both the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 versions of LittleBigPlanet 3, as well as the PS Vita version.

While the initial evidence was thin, a Google Drive link surfaced on the subreddit containing 72 files detailing Ayee’s alleged misdeeds against LittleBigPlanet. The most incriminating evidence appeared in a YouTube video uploaded on June 9, 2024, which supposedly shows Ayee and his associates successfully DDoS-ing the LittleBigPlanet PS Vita servers. Fair warning: the voices in that video are pretty grating.

I say “supposedly” because much of this information comes from an anonymous source known only as “John,” and it hasn’t been independently verified. John claimed Ayee appears in the video and shared screenshots of conversations from Discord that support his claims.

This leaves us with one burning question: why would anyone DDoS the servers of a game like LittleBigPlanet 3? According to John, the group behind the attacks felt that “LGBT people” were “ruining” the game with pride flags.

As it stands, the LBPOnline project seems to be dead. The Discord server has been wiped clean, and Ayee has gone silent. Some hopeful fans believe the file for LBPOnline is still out there, but given the serious allegations against Ayee, I wouldn’t recommend taking the risk of installing it.