One of the four MMO Kickstarter successes I wrote about earlier this month… well, success is fleeting.  Dual Universe is shutting down on August 27th.  Which is tomorrow.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Over on the site there has been post up since late July about the end of the game… as a MMORPG at least.

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.

We can’t thank all of you enough for supporting Dual Universe’s journey throughout this time. As the official Dual Universe MMO server embarks on its grand finale, the journey of Noveans will continue, flying onwards to the outer reaches of the Universe in myDU.

But all is not lost.  The developers have a self-hosted version of the game called MyDU which you can purchase ($35 US) in order to run the game locally or to setup as a hosted server you can administer and play with others.  From the post:

Although the official MMO server will be no longer be online, Dual Universe will live on with the standalone version myDU. Player-hosted public servers with old and new friends await you in Helios. Play your way: in a group or solo, on a public server or on your own, the adventure continues!

Get myDU to continue playing Dual Universe here: https://www.dualuniverse.game/buy

This is the sort of thing I do like to see.  I am sorry the game never hit the critical mass needed to survive… and I kept putting off trying it until it was too late… but the game will live on in an officially supported format.

If I could buy a similar package for EverQuest or a number of other titles, I would.

There is also mention of what they are calling Open DU, an open source version of the game server and client.

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. 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.

I appreciate them looking into this.  But, as noted above, and as I have mentioned many, many times, no game like this is built 100% from scratch.  They all licenses libraries to get past solved problems that the team doesn’t want to spend time dealing with.  They cannot turn around and open source those libraries because they do not own them.  That is a quick way to get sued.

So I don’t hold out a ton of hope for this.  While there is no doubt open source code that they could substitute in for many of those libraries, changing over is a lot of work and there is no guarantee that they will be able to replace or rewrite them all.

Anyway, another MMO down, though at least they are not just abandoning the whole project.

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