Eve Online’s first-person shooter spin-off, Dust 514, will soon be no more, as developer CCP Games has announced that the game will be permanently shutting down at the end of May, barely three years after the game was first released as a PlayStation 3 exclusive.

Senior Community Developer Vladislav “CCP Frame” Perge made the announcement in a post on the Dust 514 forum.

“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,” Perge said.

“We consider DUST 514 one of the best free-to-play offerings on the platform, but the years have caught up with us. It is with a heavy heart that we inform you that DUST 514 will be shutting down on May 30th, 2016.”

According to Perge, Dust 514 will be replaced by a new shooter that will also be set in New Eden, the same fictional universe as Eve Online and CCP’s highly anticipated virtual reality space combat shooter, Eve: Valkyrie.

The new game is being built with Unreal Engine 4, the same engine being used for Eve: Valkyrie, and will take advantage of the lessons CCP learned from Dust 514 and its now-cancelled “Project Legion” game, which the studio had already announced during its Eve Fanfest convention in 2014.

Perge said that the unnamed project is still in the earliest stages of development, but the studio is optimistic that the game will be ready to be unveiled at this year’s Fanfest in April.

Loyalty rewards for Dust 514 players

While Dust 514 will soon be retired for good, current players will not be totally left out in the cold with nothing to show for their dedication to CCP’s somewhat obscure game.

Perge promised that CCP “will provide tiered recognition rewards to our loyal DUST customers,” but he did not go into detail about what those actual rewards will be.

Since Dust 514 uses a free-to-play model, many players have spent money on in-game items and services that will now be lost forever, so whether CCP’s “tiered recognition rewards” will be good enough to make up for that remains to be seen.

Image courtesy of CCP hf