Dual Universe was a space sandbox MMO from Paris studio Novaquark. Its big idea was one shared world with no separate servers or instances. It was funded on Kickstarter in 2016, went into beta in 2020 and fully released on 27 September 2022 as a subscription game.
Content came almost entirely from players. The world was built of 25-centimetre voxels, used to make ships, stations and whole cities on procedurally generated planets. Ship systems were scripted in Lua, the market ran on player mining and trade, and PvP was fought over resources.
The official server closed on 27 August 2025, after the game had left Steam in July. What remains is myDU, a separate one-off purchase that runs on self-hosted servers, and players could export their blueprints to it before the shutdown. Novaquark has also looked into open-sourcing it.
