CCP Expects Most Players Not to Pay for Dust 514 Items

Dust 514, the upcoming free-to-play shooter from EVE Online developer CCP, can safely exist even if most of the players who are drawn to it never spend a dime, according to the team working on the MMO.

David Reid, who is the chief marketing officer working at CCP, has told Games Industry that, “We do not expect most of them to spend money, and we don’t need them to. The vast majority of players in a game like this don’t spend money, but the game is much better for having them there.”

Dust 514 is one of the first free-to-play titles to arrive on a home console and one of the biggest challenges will be to get players acquainted with the way real-world money can be spent on in-game items.

The executive says, “I think console players have seen this, whether it’s Fallout or Call Of Duty map packs or Rock Band tracks, we know that console players are familiar with this idea overall. But not in the way that a fully free-to-play, microtransaction based game is going to do so this an exciting opportunity for console people to sort of, in a pretty low risk way, try this stuff out.”

For CCP the opportunity has been a historic one, and the actual future of the genre on the PlayStation 3 might be linked to the performance of Dust 514.

The game will allow players to choose classes and load-outs before entering battlefields and trying to gain control over planets set in the same universe of the EVE Online MMO.

One novel approach that CCP has taken for Dust 514 is to charge players not for unlimited access to a piece of equipment but for the chance to use it for one character before he is killed on the battlefield.

Dust 514 is set to go into open beta on June 29 and will be officially launched later during 2012.