DCUO To Make All Episodes Free To All Players; Membership Will Get A Boost

Last month, Dimensional Ink Games made the new episode of DC Universe Online free to all players; previous episodes had required a monthly membership. In the initial announcement, the developer said it would "explore a world where our content is not gated by purchase."

The results of that exploration have apparently been positive, as Dimensional Ink and Daybreak Game Company today announced that it would make all DCUO episodes free to all players before the game's major summer release.

DCUO Senior Producer Landon "Panderus" Falls laid out the details in the May update (pay no attention to the URL), saying that membership will receive "a substantial update" to make up for the episodes no longer being exclusive to paid players. He encourages players to speak up in a thread on the forums if they have ideas or feedback.

The rest of the update focuses on what the dev team did in the first four months of the year and is doing in the future. Did you know that text strings "use some of the oldest, least efficient code in the game" and the engineering team is working on improving how the game handles them and "the potential for performance improvement is tremendous"? Fascinating!

For the near future, there are spring (May) and summer (June) seasonal events on the way, a new time capsule, and bonus weeks, and work on a PlayStation 5 version will also commence soon. Further out, we have two major releases scheduled for the rest of the year, in Q3 and Q4, as well as an "unannounced feature" in Q3.