Media Molecule, the British PlayStation studio behind titles such as LittleBigPlanet and Dreams, has confirmed on its blog that two of its beloved games will soon be affected by server closures. The games in question, of course, are Tearaway and its PS4 remake, Tearaway Unfolded.
Tearaway’s Website is Being Shuttered on August 13
The Tearaway games have a companion site called Tearaway.me, which allows people to share photos with the community and unlock guides in-game that they can use to create papercrafts in real life. It is this site that will be made defunct in the coming days. According to Media Molecule, Tearaway.me will be removed on August 13, 2026, which is three months from now. Players will no longer be able to log into the site or share images on it after that date.
As of today, all of the 64 papercraft guides that were unlockable in the game can now be downloaded on the official Media Molecule website. They have been stored inside a ZIP file, and they include reference images to go along with them.
Since the Tearaway.me server and website will no longer exist, players will soon start to encounter error messages in both Tearaway games. In Tearaway for the PS Vita, these messages may appear when a player takes a photo of their first papercraft and tries to update either their collection or each of their individual papercrafts. In Tearaway Unfolded for the PS4, however, players will get a similar error when first booting the game or attempting to upload any photos to the Tearaway.me server. Despite this, the games themselves will remain fully playable on both PS Vita and PS4.
Media Molecule Has Gradually Been Ending Support for their Latest Games
Over the last few years, Media Molecule has made it a habit to abandon or shutter the online services for its latest titles, presumably due to their lack of an active playerbase. In September 2023, the company ended development on its game creation tool Dreams, while in April 2024, it permanently closed the servers for LittleBigPlanet 3 on PS4.
For any game with online functionalities, it’s inevitable that its servers will be shut down at some point. This, in and of itself, is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is the fact that Media Molecule has done nothing to allow players to back up the thousands of user-generated levels that had been shared by people online in games like LittleBigPlanet 3. All of the hard work that players had put in over the years to create the content they wanted to make has gone to waste. Their creations are essentially lost media now.
Media Molecule hasn’t released a new game in quite some time, so it’s a tad disheartening to see each of its most recent titles get abandoned one-by-one. Maybe the company will have a pleasant surprise in store for its fans one day, but that day is certainly not today.
