Let me tell you about DayZ Bounty. It’s a very-much-unofficial mod, but it doesn’t add maps or mechanics. Instead, it adds a payment model. Pay between $5 and $20 for lives and you’ll be rewarded with cash for every zombie, bandit and player you kill – sent straight to your PayPal account.
Another thing about DayZ Bounty – Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall and Bohemia Interactive aren’t happy about it. In fact, they’re so not happy that they will be asking its creators to “cease their activities in their current form” within the next few days.
“While we fully support modifications created by the community to improve the gaming experience for players of DayZ and ArmA II,we do not support their creators putting a cost on them,” the developers told VG247. “As commercially exploiting their small additions to DayZ undermines the work done by the original team.”
“We believe that the elements of gambling that DayZ Bounty introduces challenges the basic game design aspects that DayZ is built upon. It changes the focus of DayZ from being a creative, enjoyable, gritty gaming experience to a game that is based almost solely on financial gain and that is not something we want to be associated with.”
“We will be contacting the owners of the DayZ Bounty website directly over the coming days, to ask that they cease their activities in their current form,” Bohemia added.
Crikey. Can you see a fundamental problem with the model DayZ Bounty’s team are promoting? I think I can. Or, on the flipside, do you quite like the sound of aDayZ which assigns real, monetary value to life? That’s a kind of tension unattainable in conventional game development, surely?