DUST 514, the MMO-FPS hybrid set in the EVE universe, will require a cover charge from PS3 users in order to play. This payment will then be refunded in the form of 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’,” CCP’s CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson explained to GamesIndustry.biz.
“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.”
This in-game currency can then be spent on micro-transactions, although Pétursson wouldn’t elaborate on what that might include.
“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 explained.
“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.”
DUST 514, which was recently confirmed as exclusive to PS3, is described as a “brutal ground combat and planetary conquest,” where “mercenaries on the ground wage war to acquire territory, resources and notoriety, forging and breaking agreements with the starship pilots of EVE Online as they work together in real-time to control vast regions of deep space”.
The game will arrive on PSN in 2012.
