text: Community Around the time of its release, LittleBigPlanet took off in popularity, with Mikel Reparaz of GamesRadar+ having noticed in November 2008 that "hundreds, if not thousands, of PSN users ha[d] been uploading a continuous stream of homemade levels to the game's straining servers, with varying levels of quality and dedication." By July 2009, one million levels had been published on LittleBigPlanet, and by July 2013, eight million levels had been published across the franchise. There was a variety of levels created including side-scrolling shooters. Reportedly, levels were being created that went "beyond even Media Molecule's wildest expectations." After a 2011 PSN outage, Evans had observed that multiple levels were being published per second and that "basically, everybody publishes a level." By the time the servers shut down for all games in the franchise with the exception of the PS4 port of LittleBigPlanet 3, ten million levels had been published across the franchise.
  Despite the popularity, there has been little scholarly research on the culture surrounding LittleBigPlanet. Though an early analysis focused on the commercial and technological infrastructures influence on player innovation, later studies would focus on player agency within the community. Sara M. Grimes of Cultural Studies noted how the cultural scene is "tethered" to Sony and integrates player-based activity and cultures into the LittleBigPlanet brand. She concluded that the digital culture surrounding LittleBigPlanet could either be a call to revisit ways cultural scenes can be evaluated or a corporate-controlled infrastructure that is too broad to be considered a cultural scene.