Dust 514 will require initial "cover charge"

Eve Online developer CCP has revealed that players of its upcoming PS3 massively multiplayer FPS Dust 514 will be required to pay a "cover charge". According to the developer, the charge will be refunded as in-game currency and is in place to help manage the rollout of the game.

"You're really getting the game for free but you have to pre-buy credits in the beginning," explains CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson in an interview with Gamesindustry.biz. "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.

"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."

Pétursson wouldn't go into detail about what types of items or perks could be purchased with the in-game credits, but did stress that it would not be in-line with other microtransaction-powered games.

"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."

Pétursson's reluctance to go into more detail is likely due to the recent controversy surrounding a leaked internal newsletter which referred to Eve Online as a "subscription-based golden goose". The prospect of an increased presence of microtransactions in the space-based MMOG led to a huge player backlash.

"We have always been a big believer in growing up a social network behind [Dust 514] in a slow and predictable way," Pétursson continues. "Because we have seen that if you don't do that you can end up with a very unstructured experience, where there's no cohesion to the community. By growing it at the beginning we help to make a healthy environment initially."

Source: Gamesindustry.biz