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When Star Citizen goes live, will players still be able to buy UEC with real money, and if so, how will you be able to keep the economy balanced when players can print their own in-game money?Thanks to the whole team involved with putting this masterpiece together, Qwik1.

When the game goes live we will let players buy some UEC with real money. I think we've stated before that we're going to put a cap on that. Whether it's a daily or a monthly cap, it will be a certain fixed amount that you'll be able to put into the system, and that's really to allow a couple things.One, once the game's out, since we're not charging a subscription, we need to figure out some way to bring some revenue in so we can keep the servers up and we can also be adding content as we go on. Because our plan is to continually add more and more features and more and more content. You know, it's space, so it's infinite so we can keep on building it out and making it a lot more going on there. We really want to make it reactive to what the players are doing, which will require quite a lot of game master staff and people dedicated to building content that riffs off what the players are doing in the universe.You need money to do that, so we are, our revenue plan if you want to call it that, is new players are coming in and buying their initial package or existing players who maybe don't have 20 hours a week to be flying around and adventuring and making money, but just a few hours on the weekend and they really like that cool ship so they just want to fly it and they don't mind spending a little money to buy the UEC. The philosophy of the game is that there is nothing in the game that you can only buy with money. You can earn everything playing the game, but you can also purchase some credits and shortcut having to spend the time running missions to earn some money.By the way, running mission is the fun part of the game, so that's not a grind like it would be on most of the games that would have this kind of thing. That's the core, that's the core of what Privateer was, that's the core of what Freelancer was, but we do recognize that there's people like myself who are now older and I don't have all the time in the world, so sometimes I don't mind paying a little bit for convenience I guess would be the way to say it. Those are the two ways that we think we'll be able to generate enough revenue to keep the servers on, and content flowing back into it.But, as to the question of whether it's going to unbalance the game, because we're limiting it, and because there's also a whole bunch of real world simulation or dynamics to the universe, for instance there's a cost to doing business, there's landing tariffs, there's sales taxes, your equipment has wear and tear over time, you can see it get older and then you've got to maintain it, and you've got to fix it up occasionally. All these things take money to have happen, so essentially they will balance out, even with people bringing new money into the system, these things will take a little bit of money out, and then of course the other big concept is that the player base in this universe is only a small portion of what we're really simulating. We're estimating that the player base will be no more than 10% of the economy we're simulating and the number of AI or NPCs that are running around on a big meta basis.So at that point you don't have a large group of people who... If someone comes in and everyone decides to buy some UEC, which they're not going to do, they still wouldn't be able to bring enough in to effectively unbalance the economy based on the other credit sinks that are happening in the economy and the ratio of real players to NPC players, and the fact that we also limit the stuff.That's what our plan is, I mean obviously we're not at that point yet, so it could have some flaws, but we think that it's a pretty good approach to take at the moment.

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Published on this date.2014-05-26
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Transcribed by relay.sc