DustBowl Brands
How we score
The Consumer Trust Index measures one thing above all: does a studio leave the gate open for its community, or fence it off? We call it open range vs. walled garden. Every rating is built from the studio's own published terms — not rumor, not training data — and every verdict is an opinion we're willing to defend in public, with the receipts attached.
Open range vs. walled garden
We host game servers, and we build free tools for the people who run them. So we judge studios through a server-owner and community lens. A studio earns trust when its players can host their own servers, build their own tools, export their own data, and keep what they create. It loses trust when it fences the community in, polices third-party code, or quietly rewrites the rules after people have invested years.
Even an always-online live-service game can score well — if the community can mod it, build tools for it, export its own data and logs, and owns the work its creators make. That's the green-light principle, and it runs through every pillar below.
The three pillars
Ethics
Weight 50%How fairly the studio treats the people who pay it.
- •Monetization: pay-to-win, loot boxes, and predatory microtransactions.
- •Account fairness: bans and appeals, account ownership, forced arbitration, refund posture.
- •Data & privacy: GDPR posture, quality of the ToS and privacy policy, kernel-level anti-cheat.
- •Track record: broken promises, rug-pulls, and bait-and-switch.
Hostability
Weight 25%How free the community is to run and build for the game.
- •Self-hosting is permitted, with an official server tool or binaries.
- •No history of legal aggression against community hosts or tool-makers.
- •Clear, fair rules for commercial hosts — no "authorized tools only" lock-in.
- •Server-owner freedom: no overreaching admins policing third-party code, no banning host monetization like tips or ads.
Preservation
Weight 25%Whether the game — and the community's work — survives.
- •Offline-playable, in whole or in part.
- •Survives a shutdown — private servers or an offline mode keep it alive.
- •Modding and openness are supported, not fought.
- •A clean shutdown track record when titles are sunset.
The green-light principle
A studio gets a green light when its community can mod the game, build tools for it, export its own data and logs, and owns the work its creators make. Live-service and always-online are not automatic strikes — fencing the community out is.
Score → grade → action
Overall = Ethics ×0.50 + Hostability ×0.25 + Preservation ×0.25 (each pillar 0–100).
| Score | Grade | Tier | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| 90–100 | A | Trusted | Open range. We host and build freely. |
| 80–89 | B | Trusted | Solid, with minor concerns noted. |
| 70–79 | C | Caution | Supported, but read the findings first. |
| 60–69 | D | On Notice | Still supported, but with public improvement asks and a caution banner on its tools. |
| Below 60 | F | Blacklisted | Full disengagement. We don't host, build tools for, or support the title. |
The three auto-fail dealbreakers
Any one of these forces an instant F and blacklist, regardless of the computed score:
- 1Bans all community tools. No third-party tools, mods, or utilities permitted — the gate is welded shut.
- 2Retroactive ToS changes. Rewriting the rules to strip rights people already paid for.
- 3Legal aggression against the community. Cease-and-desists or takedowns aimed at hosts, modders, or tool-makers.
How a rating gets made
- •Right of reply. Before we publish, the studio is notified and gets 7 business days to respond. Any response is published verbatim. Fact corrections are applied pre-lock, and a good-faith fix can move the score. Silence is noted on the record.
- •Pending window. If a studio engages and asks for time or submits an action plan, we can hold the rating in Pending for up to 45 days.
- •Dual-key lock. Two distinct Dune Marshalls must sign off to Lock a rating, after a legal and risk review and an evidence checklist where every claim has an attached, archived primary source.
- •Frozen forever. A locked rating never changes. No re-rating, no quiet edits. A SHA-256 hash of the locked record is stamped on lock, and the rated terms are archived (our snapshot plus an archive.org permalink).
- •Corrections are append-only. If we get a detail wrong, the score stays frozen and a top-of-page note links to a news article explaining it. We never quietly edit the verdict.
- •We will retract a rating shown to be wrong. Immutability means we don't quietly revise — it does not mean we keep a proven-false statement online. If a rating is materially incorrect, we pull it from public view entirely. The original record is preserved for our audit trail, but it stops being published.
Primary sources only
Every claim is anchored to a quote from the studio's own published terms — the EULA, ToS, privacy policy, or official documentation — and we archive each source before we publish. We rate based on their own words, on a stated date, with the verdict clearly labeled as our opinion.
This is a US-based, factual consumer assessment under a published rubric. It is editorial opinion, not legal advice.