DC Dual Force

~ the goodbye ~

DC Dual Force kept its hook in its name. Every deck ran a hero and a villain together, so you were fielding Batman alongside somebody Batman has spent his entire publication history arresting, and the deckbuilding question became which enemy pairing produced the better machine. For a licensed DC card game that is a real idea, and that kind of idea only pays off if the client it ships inside is solid.

It was not. CCG Lab built the game with Cryptozoic Entertainment, a studio with a long history in physical DC card products, and YUKE'S published it. Open beta began on 14 July 2023, and the full release landed on Steam and the Epic store on 17 October 2023. From that point the conversation around it was dominated by technical complaints rather than by anything to do with the cards.

The licensing is the part I can judge from the outside. A hero-and-villain gimmick sells a card game to people who like DC rather than to people who like card games, and I have never belonged to either group, so the version of this story I can tell is the commercial one.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the automatic refund ~

The notice went up on 21 December 2023 and did two things at once. Purchasing was disabled the same day, and everything bought on or after 17 October 2023, which is to say every sale since the full release, was to be refunded automatically. Anyone who had not seen the money by 31 January 2024 was told to take it up with whichever store they had bought from.

That is a cleaner exit than the category usually manages. The standard shape is a premium currency you are told to spend before a deadline, with whatever you fail to spend simply evaporating. YUKE'S instead treated the game's whole commercial life as something to be unwound, which looks less like generosity than like an admission that what had been sold was never really finished.

~ the leap day ~

The game came off Steam on 27 December 2023, six days after the announcement, while the standalone PC client stayed downloadable so existing players could play out the remaining window. New accounts could still be created during that period, which means one of the last things DC Dual Force did was let people start a game it had already scheduled for deletion. Server shutdown landed on 29 February 2024, a date that does not exist in three years out of every four.

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