Those planning to play the EVE-themed shooter Dust 514 will be expected to pay a $10-20 “cover charge” in order to get started, although that charge will refunded as in-game money.
“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 CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson to GI.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.”
For this very reason, Dust 514 is a PS3-exclusive. Neither Microsoft nor Nintendo are currently willing to include incremental business models in their lineups, although Microsoft is allegedly examining free-to-play games. It’s currently not clear how the free-to-play elements will work on Dust, as CCP is testing out the possibilities.
Whatever items are for sale, you’re going to have to buy at least ten bucks’ worth of the stuff if you want to play.
