Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

Done and DUSTed?

CCP has been releasing some pretty wacky metrics as of late. For EVE they've been touting the page count of their patch notes as a useful metric for expansion size. When one-third to one-half of those patch notes are simply ship rebalances, you quickly realize that the metric is mostly just smoke and mirrors. I'm not sure why CCP is resorting to such silliness where EVE is concerned, because EVE Online as a game seems quite healthy.

DUST 514, on the other hand ...

CCP was crowing a couple weeks back that DUST now has X characters created. If I recall correctly, X was in the 100s of thousands. Another goofy, entirely meaningless and misleading, metric. The game is free. People download it. They create a character to try it out. If they don't like it, they never come back. A better metric, how many of those characters have logged in once and never returned? How many of those characters have skillpoints that have not been applied for weeks? Months?

Here is the PCU (peak concurrent users) for the period May 20 2013 to June 19 2013. (CCP only started allowing people to collect this data via the API starting May 06 2013.)


With no DUST 514 expansion on the horizon to give those numbers a boost, this looks like a game that is going to experience an ever-shrinking user base. Reviews for the game certainly aren't helping. Metacritic gives DUST 514 an aggregate score of 60. That's terrible. As a first-person shooter, DUST 514 cannot compete, not even in the slightest, with newer releases. Compare to Battlefield 4. Hell, DUST 514 cannot compare to many first-person shooters that are one and two years old.

Whereas the EVE tie-in is attractive to EVE Online players, I'm not sure most first-person shooter players could give a shit. They want an attractive and engaging game, something that offers uniqueness in the field. It's a crowded gaming niche, and I'm not sure that being connected to some other game's universe (especially when that connection is mostly nebulous) is the sort of unique selling-point that FPS players are looking for. The connection is not gameplay affecting, it's not like you need an EVE player present above planet to perform an orbital bombardment. DUST is in the EVE Universe, but there is nothing that requires bonds to be made to the EVE Online side of things to be successful. In a sense, it is a fake connectivity, because you could unplug DUST from the EVE Universe entirely and the game wouldn't change measurably.

I hope CCP is making some money off this game. I can't imagine it is much, though. How many of you out there have spent real money on this game? How much when calculated monthly? From where I'm sitting DUST 514 is looking like nothing but a money pit for CCP.

Unfortunately, there's not much that can be done to improve the outlook for this game. Graphically, it would require a complete overhaul. Art and modelling is something that CCP has historically been quite slow to improve upon. The game could use more environments, because the "one" environment they do have is tiring to look at over and over. But again, art department. The physics feel too rigid (e.g., the gunner in the back of vehicles, he's like a pole welded to the vehicle bed.) There's just so much about DUST that doesn't hit the mark, compared to the competition.

As for people yammering about a PS4 release. CCP couldn't move DUST to the PS4 without a complete visual overhaul. They'd be laughed out of the building, releasing what looks like a PS2/PS3 hybrid for the PS4. Given how long it takes CCP to put out their visuals, you're looking at a good two years, probably, before a new DUST 514 would be ready for the PS4, and by then, they'd already be two years behind the current competition.

Jump into a time machine, take DUST 514 back four or five years, it probably would have been a huge hit. Unfortunately for CCP, it is not 2008 anymore.
Source: Done and DUSTed?