While Dust 514 is being billed as a free-to-play shooter on the PS3, it won’t be available as a free download, at least at first. There will be a fee associated with the game, but it will be refunded as in-game currency.
“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’,” said CCP’s CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson. “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.
As for what that currency would be spent on, Petursson was very coy as to whether the items would be cosmetic or game affecting. “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,” he said. “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. We have some initial assumptions but we’ll put it out there and see how the player base during the trials reacts to it.”
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
