The team at Daybreak Game Company announced today that they’ll be shutting down the PlayStation 3 version of their free-to-play massively-multiplayer online game DC Universe Online on January 31st, 2018 in order to “focus our resources on further optimizing the game for PlayStation 4.”
It’s not a bad run for the game, which launched in January of 2011 on PC and PlayStation 3, then later came to PlayStation 4. DCUO quickly pivoted from requiring a subscription to being free-to-play, providing the industry with an early example of how such a switch could be successfully executed.
“It was really challenging, because our content progression, everything was built with a different model in mind,” former Daybreak staffer Jens Andersen told Gamasutra in 2013 while serving as creative director on the game.
“We wanted people to have access to the entire game — everything. All of our launch content, I should say. That was important to us; we didn’t want to have to say, ‘Well, you hit level 14, time to pay now.’ Or do this ‘poke-you-in-eye strategy’ to annoy you until you sub up or give us some money or purchase something.”
DCUO account data is synced to a player’s PlayStation Network account, so the company closed out its pronouncement of the PS3 version’s demise with a call for affected players to continue playing on PS4.