Dust 514

Free-to-play first person shooter Dust 514 will charge you just a few cents–24 to be exact–to kit out your character with the game’s top-end gear.

This may seem incredibly cheap for a game that relies on micro-transactions to make money, but there’s a catch. You won’t just be buying the equipment once. Dust has a system where every time you die you get brand new weapons and armor. When you purchase an item from the store you don’t just get one copy, you get 50. This means that you can die 50 times before you need to re-buy that weapon or armor piece.

“There’s a thing about Dust, which is every time you die, you lose your items, so we’re talking about relatively small amounts of money,” explained CCP vice president of Art Morgan Godat. ”You can buy 100 copies of this gun, you can buy 100 copies of this suit of armor. We’ve got to make sure we’re pricing things at the right level, because if you die [you lose these things].”

He added, ”We’re still tuning prices – the costs will change according to the feedback we get on the beta – but I believe when I calculated it last, at its most high-end – if you assume that somebody came in and had to buy, with real-world money, the best gear for a serious throw down (they already had the skills, which by the way you have to build up and work up to be able to use the equipment) it was like a 24-cent thing.”

“That’s assuming every piece of your equipment, including your dropsuit, was purchased with real-world money, and every time you died, it was a 24-cent cost to assemble your entire fit.”

While the idea seems perfect from a business stand point, I can see it becoming really annoying from a gameplay perspective. People are going to avoid wearing the best gear through fear of losing it. I realize that you can simply use the weaker gear and pay with in-game credits, but surely CCP doesn’t want to encourage this kind of thinking.

How do you feel about continually buying gear?