LittleBigPlanet: Now You Don’t Own What You’ve Created, Either
from the poof-it's-gone dept
For several years now, we’ve had a running series of posts discussing how, when it comes to digital goods, you often don’t own what you’ve bought. This ugliness shows up with all kinds of content, including purchased movies, books, and shows on digital platforms. But it has reared its head acutely as of late in the video game industry. The way this goes is that a publisher releases a game in whole, people buy it, and at some later date the publisher decides to shut down backend servers that render the game partially or totally unplayable for those that bought it. This has the effect of deleting pieces of culture, a real problem for those interested in the preservation of this artform, and a real problem for the entire bargain that is copyright, where all that culture is eventually supposed to end up in the public domain.
But all of that is just on the topic of not owning what you’ve bought. With more games allowing for creative expression within them, spearheaded in part by titles like LittleBigPlanet, it’s also the case that you don’t own what you’ve created. Well, with the full shutdown of the LittleBigPlanet servers, all of the user-created content in the game is being whisked away along with the ability to purchase the game itself.
Sony has indefinitely decommissioned the PlayStation 4 servers for puzzle platformer LittleBigPlanet 3, the company announced in an update to one of its support pages. The permanent shutdown comes just months after the servers were temporarily taken offline due to ongoing issues. Fans now fear potentially hundreds of thousands of player creations not saved locally will be lost for good.
“Due to ongoing technical issues which resulted in the LittleBigPlanet 3 servers for PlayStation 4 being taken offline temporarily in January 2024, the decision has been made to keep the servers offline indefinitely,” Sony wrote in the update, first spotted by Delisted Games. “All online services including access to other players’ creations for LittleBigPlanet 3 are no longer available.”
Again, to be clear, the game will still work offline. And if users who created content saved that content locally, they’ll still have it. But many, many gamers saved their creations in the online game servers and used that online component to share what they created with other players. Sony spit out social media content to let the public know the servers were simply never coming back online. Absent from that communication was any plan, method, or capability for those who bought, played, and created content for the game to access any of that content. It’s just, poof, gone.
“Nearly 16 years worth of user generated content, millions of levels, some with millions of plays and hearts,” wrote one long-time player, Weeni-Tortellini, on Reddit in January. “Absolutely iconic levels locked away forever with no way to experience them again. To me, the servers shutting down is a hefty chunk bitten out of LittleBigPlanet’s history. I personally have many levels I made as a kid. Digital relics of what made me as creative as i am today, and The only access to these levels i have is thru the servers. I would be devastated if I could never experience them again.”
Then devastated ye shall be, it seems. I get that technical difficulties can arise. But come on, now. No backups? No way to restore the servers temporarily? Or would there be too much time, energy, and effort required precluding Sony from wanting to do that? We don’t know, because the company hasn’t said. Instead, all this content goes away by fiat, the customers who forked over money and put time into creating within the game be damned.
If companies like Sony are going to be so pernicious with their own centralized servers in this manner, the least they could do would be to instead move to some decentralized and/or user-driven hosting solution. You know, so that a decade’s worth of culture doesn’t simply go away on the whim of one company.
Filed Under: digital ownership, littlebigplanet, ownership
Companies: sony
Comments on “LittleBigPlanet: Now You Don’t Own What You’ve Created, Either”
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I don’t think companies like Sony will ever understand that games like LBP are more than just revenue sources; they’re universes that people inhabit.
It’s especially devastating because the online level creation community is literally the only reason to play LBP beyond the campaign. The story mode might only last a couple of hours but the tools it gave people to create custom levels/content meant you could sink hundreds or thousands of hours into the game.
I’ve become averse to these level editor centric games (Super Mario Maker, LBP, Dreams, etc.) because their creators have shown that they will erase everything you’ve ever built on their infrastructure the moment it becomes inconvenient to host it.
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There are definitely ways to do “level editor centric” games well, without creating a single point of failure owned and operated by an entity with no stake in the community around them. Levels should be saved as files (or copy/pasteable strings, if they are short enough) which can be hosted anywhere, and the game should provide a convenient way to import and export collections of levels in bulk. Then the community can host its own archive (or archives) organised according to the community’s wishes, anyone can create backups, etc.
The precision platforming game N is a great example. The official N User Map Archive (NUMA) started as an unofficial fan-hosted site; my maps from 2004 are still there, and I can easily copy/paste them to retain copies if I want.
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Yeah giving people a way to archive their creations is absolutely the way to go. The issue is usually that creations are hosted on centralized servers and the owners of those servers don’t care enough to release an archive or torrent of the user data.
Mmm. Now that you’ve reminded me of N, I wanna give that a go again. It’s been a while. Wonder where I left off.
That sucks. I played this game not too long ago and I noticed that the servers were down while playing, but wasn’t sure why. Guess I’m glad that I didn’t invest my time and energy into the level creator, though.
As for the game itself, the campaign isn’t that long. You could devote a whole weekend to it and get everything done within that weekend. So, the game is now left considerably weaker because of this move.
I personally wish Sony would release some source code so that fan servers could be set up so that this content can continue to be preserved. I mean, Sony isn’t going to be maintaining such servers, so why not release code to allow others to pick up where Sony left off?
Yeah, I know, they’d rather DMCA culture into oblivion than do that.
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“I personally wish Sony would release some source code so that fan servers could be set up so that this content can continue to be preserved. I mean, Sony isn’t going to be maintaining such servers, so why not release code to allow others to pick up where Sony left off?”
See, this is where I’m at too. Why the hell would they not do this? I mean, I’m 40. The peak of my internet gaming was Quake through Team Fortress 2. Releasing source code and keeping games alive years beyond their intended support was the de facto rule.
So it confuses me that gaming companies are now doing this. I mean, I get that “free to play” games as a service are not truly owned by their players, but that still doesn’t explain why the company can’t open source it as an end of life move? These games should follow old school Activision’s lead like with Enemy Territory. That wasn’t a game as a service product in the modern sense, but it was the by product of a cancelled expansion pack that the company gave free to the community. I don’t see how that couldn’t be adopted in these situations either.
Isn’t this a problem common to anything where your work is stored on remote servers you don’t control? Whether it be games or email or a web site or documents you’ve written, if the servers are turned off the work goes away whether you want it to or not. GMail, Google Docs, Dropbox, Adobe’s cloud storage for images/documents, any web host’s web-based site creator/editor, the DNS name records for your domains stored in your DNS hosting company’s database, all of it is vulnerable to this same thing with consequences that can range from highly annoying to utterly catastrophic. Depending on their backup system doesn’t help, it’s going away when the servers do. You have to have your own backups or copies of everything stored locally to be able to recover.
I think we need to pound into people’s heads that this is the way things work and that the only options you have are:
If you find a company willing to give you #2, let us all know.
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That approach works well for content that someone actually controls (e.g., documents on Google Docs), but not so much for content that someone has limited-to-no control over (e.g., levels created in online-enabled “builder” games). Ideally, Sony could have cut off the ability to create and share new content in LBP3 while still allowing people to access existing fan-made content for a good long while. Hell, Sony could’ve ported LBP3 to PC and made the sharing of fan-made content that much easier. But now all that content is either lost forever or sitting on the hard drives of LBP3 players who have no easy way of sharing it with one another.
It's "The Crew" all over again
This shit needs to stop. Companies should not be allowed to just take things people paid money for away. Fight back against this shit:
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
“But when you purchased our product you agreed that we actually own the rights of everything you created using our product, and anything you imagined or created while our product was playing in the background or on pause, and upto 1 hour after you shut down the product. Its right there in that thing you sped thru, in between the clause that we own your firstborns soul, and can raid your fridge for any leftover pizza if we want.”
Somebody’s not good with math…
Little Big Planet 3 was announced in June 2014. That’s nearly ten years, not 16.
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LittleBigPlanet 3 was be able to also access content from LBP 1 and 2? The first LittleBigPlanet was released around 2008, as the first PS3 lineup.
If so, numbers would add up and everybody would be happy.
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Maybe next time you should actually know what you’re talking about before being so confidently wrong.
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…said AC while gazing into the mirror.
Before long EVERYTHING will be a subscription service, because there’s no end to corporate greed.
Capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.
what are the odds,
That Content created ON THEIR SERVERS, becomes THEIRS.
I wonder if there were changes in the years in the TOS, esp recent.
Amyhing created on THEIR servers would become THEIRS. No accreditation would be given.
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Correct.
The chance of the TOS having some very fine print, small enough to make even a lawyer squint, probably has verbiage that automatically strips the creator of all future rights, and transfers them to Sony without further recourse is obviously greater than zero. How much greater, I’d hesitate to put my money on anything less than 50%.
The only way for anyone to stop this…. no, make that two ways. First would be obvious: simply stop buying and using Sony games (and likely their other products as well). But it would also appear to the open-eyed members of society that gamers are the most blind to this solution. Pavlov would’ve had a hay-day investigating this phenomenon, were he alive today.
Second is much more expensive, and that would be form a loose “gamer’s union”, and class-action sue Sony for usurpation of creator’s rights under the Copyright Act. I find it difficult to believe that Sony could get away with terms in the TOS that, without any input from the creator, strip creators of any and all rights, period.
A third and quite distant possibility would be for fan-hosted servers, but that can get expensive, and depending on who’s running the show, can be just as ham-fisted or hard-nosed as Sony is now. Ideally there would be a professional server administrator who can be fired by a vote of all the current players, but even then, that voting process would have to a) be held outside of the administrator’s control (a separate site such as social media site), and b) someone would also have to be able to remove the administrator and place the “keys to the kingdom” with some other professional outfit. And no, more than one server for any single game will just fracture the whole of the ecosystem. Not good, now or in the future.
Daunting tasks, all. But in the long run, it can work out, if for no other reason than to preserve the culture itself.
p.s. In case it’s not obvious, I’m not a gamer of any sort. But I can appreciate the damage done to the culture by the Copyright Act, and I wholeheartedly endorse any action that counters, or attempts to counter, that most pernicious of all of Congress’s creations, ever. Overall, the percentage of gamers to the whole of society is still pretty small. But I do see the tipping point coming in the near future, whereby something like the Pirate Party, only called the Gaming Party, will start to exert influence that can’t be ignored by either the brunchlords or their pet Congresscritters.
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Possibly, but even if users retain copyright/ownership, that wouldn’t solve the problem. Sony would still have no obligation to continue hosting those creations.
Yeah, that’s predictable, sadly. Online content is going to be removed at some time. Sony will not value anything that’s not immediately profitable. Unless a community solution is found (e.g. Sony letting people host their own servers), the content is lost.
There’s no solution other than forcing corporations to allow third party hosting of content they abandon. Good luck with that…
This is a pattern with Sony. 15 years ago they sold a bunch of Sony Netboxes. To use a Netbox you had to authenticate with a Sony server, after which you could start using it to stream content. Authentication might last for a day if you were lucky. Then Sony shut down those servers after a few years, instantly bricking everybody’s Netbox.
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Circa 1990, we were bitching that Sony VCR (“VTR” in Sony-speak) remote controls had TV buttons that would only work for Sony TVs. The competitors either had programmable remotes, or at least had the decency to omit the TV buttons so as not to confuse people. (“Why isn’t the volume changing?” “Those volume buttons don’t do anything; use the ones on the other remote.”)
It’s not quite the same level of lock-in, but they’ve always put their own profits above consumer satisfaction.
It’s also possible that there was a security issue found in the servers (or server code) that was either impossible to fix or deemed infeasible to fix for whatever reason – resulting in the decision to just keep the servers offline indefinitely so as to negate the possibility of a hack through them (especially given Sony’s history with getting hacked – especially the Great PSN Hack of 2011).
That said, like any other hypothesis, this is all speculation unless, and until, Sony details why this decision was made.
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Even in that scenario: Divorce a server hosting only the level files from the rest of the network.
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I’m not sayin’ it was aliens …
but it was aliens
I’m surprised Super Mario Maker didn’t get mentioned. With the termination of online services for the Wii U, that game’s levels are also gone.
This is why we avoid Sony
To be more precise: Sony everything. Because it’s not a matter of if they’ll screw customers over, only a matter of when. They’ve made it very, VERY clear over decades that this is their business model.
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Or as anyone in the business will tell you:
Sont is introducing a sequel to littlebigplanet soon.
It’s essentially an identical game with minor cosmetic tweaks but it’s going to be priced as an AAA+ top-end game so expect $70+.
And shutting down v3, is the way to force people onto v4. They are going to claim due to “technical and backward incompatibilies” you can ONLY get your v3 stuff back if you buy v4.
It’s a totally fraudulent barefaced lie.
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