EVE Online spinoff shooter Dust 514 is shutting down in May
New PC shooter will eventually succeed the free-to-play PS3 offering
EVE Online has one of the most fanatical and committed fanbases in all of gaming, but even that level of devotion wasn’t enough to sustain interest in spinoff PlayStation 3 first-person shooter Dust 514.
Today, CCP Games announced that after three years, the free-to-play Dust 514 will shut down on 30 May. While initial hype for the game was positive, launch reviews were mostly middling and fans of the PC space game never seemed to be quite as enthusiastic about the console tie-in.
“We are very proud of what we’ve learned and accomplished with Dust 514 on PlayStation 3 over the past three years and it is an honor to be a part of such a dedicated community,” reads a statement from the development team. “We consider Dust 514 one of the best free-to-play offerings on the platform, but the years have caught up with us.”
No doubt, actively supporting an online PlayStation 3 game in 2016 has to be an increasingly questionable pursuit for the folks funding the servers, and CCP says that while they intended to do more with Dust (as seen in the Project Legion concept revealed at EVE Fanfest 2014), the older tech of the platform and their own code couldn’t really support it. And the promised 1.3 game update isn’t coming, either.
Instead, CCP is pushing forward with a brand new first-person shooter that uses Unreal Engine 4 – and is only currently slated to hit PC, where all the EVE Online players are anyway. It’s still in an early stage, but CCP says it will honour some concepts of Dust 514 while being a totally new experience. And dedicated Dust 514 players should expect some kind of bonus once the game is finally live.
EVE Fanfest 2016 is just around the corner in April, taking place in Reykjavik, Iceland as always, and an update on the as-yet-untitled PC shooter is promised during a livestream then. For the time being, you’ve got about four months to soak in as much Dust 514 as you can before it’s gone forever.
Andrew Hayward
Freelance Writer 
