Bring your wallet when you enlist for DUST 514.

JULY 11, 2011 • Developer CCP says it will charge a “cover fee” that players will have to pay in order to play DUST 514 on the PlayStation 3. The title is primarily a free-to-play experience, yet CCP believes it is important that players get acquainted with the virtual item store for the game. The fee, which will be somewhere between $10 and $20, will immediately be converted into in-game currency.

Impact: From our perspective, DUST 514 looks like a premium online FPS experience. That’s a positive when it comes down to charging consumers for the pleasure of playing a game. Yet charging up front for virtual currency or goods strikes us as a non-sequitur within the free-to-play model, and inherently self-limiting. The appeal of free-to-play is to try out content for extended periods without paying. Slapping on a pay-to-play cost, regardless of the immediate in-game benefit, encourages fence-sitters to rely on word-of-mouth, and/or reviews before they jump in and pay up. Recouping production costs up front may be attractive, and the industry standard of converting only 2% to 3% of free players into paying players can be scary, but what we think is the other side of the coin is the arrival of more premium F2P games that can push conversion into the 6% to 10% range. It doesn’t seem like CCP believes DUST 514 is one of those games.