The public beta for Dust 514 is beginning soon, an important milestone for the free-to-play PS3 shooter. CCP chief marketing officer David Reid said that they know that launching a game in the fashion that they are will bring in a lot of players, but not necessarily a lot of payers.

“We do not expect most of them to spend money, and we don’t need them to,” said Reid. “The vast majority of players in a game like this don’t spend money, but the game is much better for having them there.”

“I think console players have seen this, whether it’s Fallout or Call Of Duty map packs or Rock Band tracks, we know that console players are familiar with this idea overall,” he said of the monetizing system. “But not in the way that a fully free-to-play, micro-transaction based game is going to do so this an exciting opportunity for console people to sort of, in a pretty low risk way, try this stuff out. We think we’re kind of doing something fairly historic here, and we want gamers to feel excited about trying that without being worried about it. And I think we found a good way to do that here.”

Source: GamesIndustry.biz