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Planning tojoin Dust 514's free-to-play party? Better bringing a few bucks for admission. CCP has confirmed it will be charging a small, one-time entry fee for access to its online first-person shooter; money which will then be handed back as in-game currency to be used in the free-to-play game's virtual economy.
"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'," explained CCP's CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson toGamesIndustry.biz, insisting, “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.”
Pétursson said CPPhopes tofoster a 'healthy environment' by encouraging players to partakein the game's micro-transactions from the very beginning. He added Sony has thrown its support behind the business model, and is eager to use Dust 514 as a litmus test for future free-to-play initiatives.
Speaking to Sony's support, and the reasoning behind Dust 514's PS3 exclusivity, Pétursson added: "By going exclusive with either platform allows us to do more innovation. The lowest common denominators would have been so small we couldn't do things that are really interesting. Sony was quite motivated in allowing us to do things we requested of them to the point they said 'no one has really asked about that before and we've never thought about, but why not?' They were very enthusiastic and open to really do something world changing and that's what swayed the decision to go with them."
Dust 514 is an online, first-person shooter designed to co-exist with CCP's popular PC multiplayer game, EVE Online. Read ourE3 previewto find out how it intends to pull that off.
Jul 11, 2011
E3 2011: Dust 514 preview
Ambition be thy name
E3 2011: CCP explains how Dust 514 will merge with EVE Online
"'Persistence' is the key word here," says CCP community manager
