Mines Weren't Crafted In A: DayZ's Business Model

DayZ will make money... or continue to be dead trying. But in order to do that, its standalone has to first become, well, existent. We've seen bits and snippets stumbling around in YouTube's muddiest brush, but Bohemia has yet to pull the trigger on anything the succulent-brained masses can play. Good news, though! A closed alpha test is now underway, and the Rocket man/myth/legend himself has a pretty good idea of how we'll be paying for it. The short version: ever hear of a game called Minecraft?

Speaking with Gamasutra in an interview the size of god a very big dog one of my interviews, Rocket outlined where DayZ's at now, and where it'll end up in the near future:

"What we're doing at the moment is, we gave free keys as a gift to the forum moderators, the Reddit moderators, people who helped out with DayZ development, and stuff like that. I guess there's about 30-100 people involved with that. We are doing content updates all the time. The Steam model is really working well for us."

"From here, once we've finished our server/client architecture - because we're moving it an MMO model - we're reviewing the situation of that in June, and then we do an alpha, just like Minecraft. People pay X amount of dollars and they get early, cheap access to it, and then once it's beta, price goes up, maybe, say, $10, and once it goes retail, the price goes up $10."

Given that Minecraft sort of went on to become gaming's biggest breakout success in ages, that sounds like a fairly sensible plan. So look for that sometime around June or July, and then die. In a videogame where survival is oftentimes considered unlikely! And after that, you can just rot. Rotate around in your chair, go outside, and get some fresh air, that is. Summer's a glorious time of year, after all. Wouldn't want to miss it!