Frontier Development is opening its $150 premium beta for Elite: Dangerous up to 10,000 prospective players.
Elite: Dangerous look like it’s going to be a pretty cool game. That said, we’re curious as to how much you’d be willing to pay to play it early? While you could probably find some enthusiastic fans who would insist that the experiences would be priceless, the game’s makers at Frontier Developments have been able to come up with a number: $150. That, at least, is how much the company intends to charge the 10,000 players it plans to allow into a recently announced “premium beta.”
Players who buy into the beta will gain access to single and multiplayer modes taking place in five star systems “covering a 200 cubic light year volume of space.” The Premium Beta will also include automatic access to all future beta stages, all “major” DLC packs after the game’s release and, of course, a copy of the game itself.
“The start of the Premium Beta phase is another exciting moment in our development,” said Frontier CEO David Braben. “This is a significant and sensible step-change with which to test the next level of scaling of our cloud-based systems and servers as we move towards the very large numbers of people we will eventually have playing.
While that’s all well and good, it’s hard not to look at the beta and wonder why Frontier feels the need to charge players to essentially test their game in progress. Granted, the $150 price tag is a tad more affordable than the $295 it was charging Alpha access, but even then there’s just something about this that rubs me the wrong way. What do you guys think?
