Dust 514 Is Free-To-Play, Except Not

Well it is, but it isn't. Contradictions? We'll let CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson explain.

“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,” he told 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.

“We have always been a big believer in growing up a social network behind the game in a slow and predictable way. 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.”

So you have to pay then. Right.

According to Pétursson, keeping Dust 514 exclusive to PlayStation 3 allowed the company to introduce more "innovation".

“By going exclusive with either platform allows us to do more innovation. The lowest common denominators would have been so small we couldn’t do things that are really interesting.

“Sony was quite motivated in allowing us to do things we requested of them to the point they said ‘no one has really asked about that before and we’ve never thought about, but why not?’ They were very enthusiastic and open to really do something world changing and that’s what swayed the decision to go with them.”