If you regularly play games, you’ve probably been here: you’re bored with your current rotation, you go to your platform’s store and after realizing you probably don’t want to buy another game, you start skimming through the selection of free-to-play titles.
Maybe this isn’t as common as I think, but it’s been a regular occurrence for my friends and me for years, and it’s led to the discovery of plenty of terrible so-called games.
Big City Stories, Warface, Don’t Even Think, Caravan Stories, Fantasy Strike, Operation7: Showdown, Bless Unleashed, the list goes on, and I could say a lot about some of them.
But there are a few games I left off that list for a reason; they’ve become relevant to me again just this past week.
Like I mentioned earlier, a friend of mine and I recently found ourselves in that same boredom-fueled search, which once again led us to the free-to-play section of the PlayStation Store.
After realizing most of the games were the same ones we’d already seen, I gave up and went back to playing something on my own. But my friend wasn’t ready to give up just yet and instead started digging through his game catalog to find something we could play together.
My friend rarely has PlayStation Plus unless he feels like he really needs it, which limited our options to free-to-play games. After skipping over most of the titles he’d already played, he rediscovered a game we hadn’t touched in years: Atom Universe.
If you’ve never heard of it — which I wouldn’t be surprised by — Atom Universe is an online social hub released in 2016, as a spiritual successor to Sony’s PlayStation Home, which shut down just a year earlier in 2015.
For whatever reason, the game was also seemingly renamed to Home Legacy at some point on Steam but has remained as Atom Universe on PlayStation and on all of its in-game branding.
Long story short, Atom Universe wasn’t very good, some might even call it downright terrible, and it failed to catch on anywhere near as much as PlayStation Home did.
My friend and I most likely discovered Atom Universe sometime around 2019, although I could be completely wrong. When we first tried it, we unsurprisingly found that the game was practically dead. Still, it was clear there were a few people hanging on, along with others who had likely discovered the game the same way we did.
Because of how rough the game felt, we dropped it almost immediately, leaving it to gather dust in our libraries for what we assumed would be forever. But, as I mentioned earlier, that didn’t end up being the case.
When we rediscovered it, my friend almost instantly decided to redownload it and try it again. My memory of the game’s quality stopped me from doing the same.
When he finally got back into it, he told me something surprising; it was still up and running in 2026 and still had a few active players. After a bit more exploring, he even found that the game still has a Discord server.
So what did I do with that information? I joined it, of course, and started looking around.
To my surprise, the Discord was fairly active, with people posting every couple of days and even organizing what looked like monthly in-game events.
Out of curiosity, I started checking some recently active users’ linked PlayStation profiles and was shocked to see that at least ten of these people had hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hours played in Atom Universe. One user even had over five thousand hours logged.
It was truly surprising to see that a game many people considered “dead” back in 2019, or even years earlier, still has a very small but extremely dedicated player base. That kind of thing isn’t unheard of but seeing it happen with a game built entirely around social interaction makes it especially interesting.
Even more interestingly, upon further inspection, many of these high-playtime users had a few other games in common, mainly Nebula Realms and The Four Kings Casino and Slots.
I haven’t been able to find much information on Nebula Realms, but it appears to have been very similar to Atom Universe, serving as another spiritual successor to PlayStation Home. It also seems to have been shut down at some point and removed from the PlayStation Store.
Four Kings Casino and Slots is still available and somewhat active. My friend and I tried it out, but it was about as underwhelming as expected, essentially the same concept as Atom Universe and Nebula Realms, just centered around virtual gambling.
In the days since, I’ve tried to engage with the small active community on the Atom Universe Discord, but any mention of the game’s player count, player base or its status as a “dead” game tends to be deleted within hours by the moderators, making discussion somewhat difficult.
In the end, it’s interesting, and honestly a bit endearing, to see “dead” games maintain small but active communities. But it’s still surprising that a game like Atom Universe, with its focus on social interaction and generally poor reputation, is one of them, and that the people who stick with it are so dedicated.
Whitford can be reached at [email protected].
