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Rust finally has a release date for consoles, and it's coming really soon. Developer Double Eleven previously promised that Rust would be coming this spring, but held off on providing an exact release date. Now it's official that the nearly decade-old game will arrive on consoles this May.

Rust had a massive resurgence last year on PC, causing it to generate a ton of buzz and revenue. The newfound attention for the survival game caused more and more players to wonder when it would be coming to console. Although a console port had been announced in 2019, it fell under the radar for a long time, and caused some to wonder if it had been canned entirely. Thankfully, Double Eleven squashed these fears at the start of 2021 by delving deeper into the new version and releasing gameplay for Rust running on PS4.

Double Eleven released a new blog post (via IGN) announcing that Rust would release on PS4 and Xbox One (it will also run in backward compatible mode on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S) on May 21, 2021. The developer also noted how it will differ quite a bit from Facepunch's PC version as time goes on. "We first started talking to Facepunch in 2016 about the idea of creating a Console version of Rust and how that could work. We knew early on that the two games would need to be in separate universes given that the PC edition can expand as it needed to, and performance would be maintained so long as people continued to upgrade their hardware, while consoles on the other hand have finite resources that need to be more closely managed," said Double Eleven.

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A console beta for Rust has been ongoing for the last few weeks, but is under heavy NDA. Previously released gameplay seems to suggest that it will largely share the core mechanics of the PC version. The console versions of Rust will have their own update roadmap, separate from the one laid out for the PC version, and this content plan will be handled independently due to the limitations of consoles as opposed to PC.

Whether or not this will be an issue going forward is unclear, but hopefully, Double Eleven can support Rust for a respectable amount of time without sacrificing quality. It's quite impressive that the game is coming to consoles at all in the first place, and it doesn't even look compromised when compared to the PC version. Given the revival of Rust's popularity in the last few months, it seems like the perfect time to release the game on consoles and will hopefully give the game a healthy fanbase on consoles.

Rust will release on Xbox One and PS4 on May 21, 2021.