Dust 514 to Have a Mandatory “Cover Charge” System
By Alex Co | July 11, 2011 | News | No comments | Share
If you’re not familiar with Dust 514, it’s one of Sony’s big reveals at this year’s E3. The developer, CCP Games, claims it will interact with its PC cousin – EVE Online.
The MMOFPS will somehow implement a “cover charge” payment method. I think it’s best if I let CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson explain it himself.
In the beginning you have to pre-buy credits, so you pay something like $10-$20 to enter the game and you get the equivalent number of credits in the game once you do that. We call this the 'cover charge.'CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson on the game's cover charge payment system
Before any of you cry for CCP Games’ heads, allow them to explain why they’re doing it.
You're really getting the game for free but you have to pre-buy credits in the beginning. We might go fully free-to-play down the line, but in the beginning we have a cover charge just to manage the initial launch of it.CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson on why they're implementing a cover charge payment system
Dust 514 will be a PlayStation 3 exclusive and it’s also going to be the first PS3 free-to-play game if I’m not mistaken. Pétursson has confirmed that micro-transactions will be part of the game, but he declined to go into detail whether they’re going to be merely cosmetic items, or game-altering items like weapons, armors, etc.
It's not like in shooters where you've seen virtual goods sales. Whether that's some of the games you've seen in Asia, whether that's Battlefield, or other games, we don’t really have a set of things we're communicating on now because a lot of this comes out in the private trials that we're starting at the end of this year, where we're just starting to tune and test and see what works. That's how we'll define it.Pétursson on micro-transactions
Dust 514 is scheduled to have a beta later this year, while the full game is set to be out sometime in 2012.
Are you ok with the studio’s “cover charge” system? Will F2P games work on consoles? I guess we’ll know a preliminary answer once the beta drops later in the year.
