Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Well this is seriously sucky news: 

Today, we are announcing the closure of the Dual Universe MMO server. It is with a heavy heart from all of us here on the Dual Universe team and at Novaquark to tell you that the Dual Universe MMO server will be sunsetting on Wednesday, August 27th, 2025 at 14:00 UTC.

Longtime readers will remember how excited I was about Dual Universe, at least in terms of its technical and conceptual ambition. In ancient times (by which I mean 2018), I was even vibing on the possibility that Dual Universe was the closest to becoming the Metaverse with a capital M.

I'm reaching out to lead creator J.C. Baillie, to find out what happened. The project was originally funded as a successful Kickstarters with over 8000 backers, so I thought it would (at minimum) succeed as an Eve Online-like niche MMO. Then again, Eve is still going relatively strong, as is Star Citizen. My general rule of thumb is still that science fiction-themed MMOs rarely get massive; the only one that's attracted over 1 million subscribers was Star Wars: The Old Republic. (Which is, you know, Star Wars; also, even that MMO quickly lost that subscriber base.) Raph Koster has told me that he's done surveys suggesting there is a demand for sci-fi-themed MMOs, but the jury's still out on that question — we'll have another proof point when Raph's Stars Reach officially launches.

Anyway, there is a hopeful glimmer in the impending death of Dual Universe — it may be revived as an open source community project:

We are also considering a bold option, in line with the initiative of the “Stop Killing Games” movement that has been recently gaining attention. myDU has been lauded as a good step forward by content creators such as Obsidian Ant. [Watch above – WJA] Can we take this further?

We are in the process of exploring the possibility to move Dual Universe, both client and server, to an open source license. This is not easy to do on the technical side, but in order to prepare for a public build, there is also the legal side as Dual Universe integrates several custom proprietary technologies from third parties. Nevertheless, we want to start opening a dialog with you, hear your opinion and discuss how we could perhaps make this idea a reality. 

We will soon communicate on the next step on this road, and set up a discussion room on our public Discord.

Read the rest here.