All right, I know that headline is probably a lot to take in, but bear with me for a little bit here while we get the context out of the way. Trust me, you’re gonna need it. In April 2024, Sony and developer Sumo Digital announced that the servers for the PlayStation 4 version of LittleBigPlanet 3 were being “decommissioned” for good. This announcement was made just after the servers were “temporarily” shut down in January 2024, which the official LittleBigPlanet X account attributed to “a number of issues.” These “issues” ended up being the same wave of DDoS attacks that had plagued the PlayStation 3 version of the game.
The PlayStation 4 version of LittleBigPlanet 3 was the last version of the game with online support, as the servers for the PlayStation Vita version of LittleBigPlanet had gone offline in 2021. Of course, the LittleBigPlanet series as a whole almost entirely revolves around user-created stages, so fans have been looking for a way to host private servers ever since LittleBigPlanet 3 kicked the bucket.
On March 3 of this year, long-serving LittleBigPlanet content creator Ayee announced LBPOnline. By downloading a file to a USB drive and plugging it into your PlayStation 4 or 5, you could reportedly download a custom map that would allow you to access privately hosted servers in LittleBigPlanet 3, and you didn’t even need to jailbreak your PlayStation of choice to pull it off.
According to Ayee’s post on Instagram, LBPOnline was supposed to officially roll out on May 4. That date has, of course, passed, and LBPOnline is nowhere to be found…so what happened? This post on the r/littlebigplanet subreddit is what happened.
As it turns out, in the days leading up to LBPOnline’s release, the community turned on Ayee. The post above alleged that both Ayee and a user known as Epic, who were both working on the LBPOnline project, were two of the people behind the DDoS attacks that had taken down the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 versions of LittleBigPlanet 3, as well as LittleBigPlanet PS Vita.
While the evidence in the initial post was a bit sparse, a Google Drive containing 72 files of Ayee’s crimes against LittleBigPlanet surfaced on the subreddit a couple of days later. The most damming piece of evidence is a YouTube video uploaded on June 9, 2024, which allegedly shows Ayee and his cronies successfully DDoS-ing the servers for LittleBigPlanet PS Vita. I warn you not to watch that video at too loud a volume, as their shrill and squeaky voices are incredibly annoying.
I say “allegedly” because a lot of this information comes from someone simply known as “John” and hasn’t been independently verified. John corroborated that Ayee is present in the video above in a post on X, and also shared several screenshots of his conversations with the group on Discord.
So, that just leaves one question…why? What possible reason could someone have for DDoS-ing the servers of a game like LittleBigPlanet 3? Well, according to John, the group behind the DDoS attacks did so because, and I quote, they “felt like ‘LGBT people’ were ‘ruining’ the game with pride flags…”
In any case, the LBPOnline project is now dead in the water. The Discord server for the project has been wiped, and Ayee has gone radio silent. According to some hopefuls, the file for LBPOnline that allows you to access the project is floating around out there somewhere, but if even one percent of the stuff alleged against Ayee is true…I personally wouldn’t recommend installing it.
