CCP has announced that its upcoming PS3-exclusive MMOFPS Dust 514 will be hitting up gamers with a “cover charge”, as part of its free-to-play-but-not-actually business model.
“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 CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson tells 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.”
Those in-game credits will obviously be redeemable for stuff of some kind, although Pétursson remains vague about what exactly that’s going to be.
“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,” he says.
Dust 514 is expected to launch sometime in early 2012.
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