CCP Games’ upcoming MMOFPS, Dust 514, is coming to PlayStation 3 exclusively and the studio decided to take some time to explain their reasoning behind this decision. David Reid, chief marketing officer, discussed how Sony’s system was the obvious choice when considering the connectivity plans between Eve Online and Dust 514.
Think about the impact of virtual goods policies. People at CCP and Sony have sat in rooms to work this out. It’s not been this ‘Here’s this virtual goods policy. You must adhere to it or else you can’t be on our platform’
Sony has been a terrific partner in enabling us to have that discussion with them, and trying to be innovative and flexible and finding ways that it can work for CCP, it can work for Dust players, and it can work for the Sony ecosystem. Not easy to do, especially when you’re talking about division in America, Europe and Japan. It takes a partner who is willing to go the extra mile, and Sony has been terrific on that front
One of the cross-platform features that was discussed was voice chat between Eve Online and Dust 514 players. The studio claims that no other console could have accomplished this.
This is an important part of EVE and an important part of first-person shooters. We think it’s important for those people to be able to speak to one another, not just text each other. So we had the issue of enabling thousands of EVE players to chat with millions of PlayStation users. We worked with Sony to find a solution to this, and that solution is not something we could have discovered with Xbox.
So, there you have it. For these reasons, the PlayStation 3 ended up being the perfect home for CCP Games’ MMOFPS. Dust 514 has not been given a set release date, but it is expected to come out sometime this year.