Day Z Becoming Standalone Title Following Minecraft’s Example

Day Z, the immensely popular ARMA II zombie apocalypse game mod, will become a standalone title by September.

In an interview with Digital Spy, Project Lead Dean Hall said the development of Day Z would follow in the footsteps of Minecraft.

“Kind of like Minecraft, the full release isn’t necessarily the goal, the development itself that’s the goal, and see where the idea goes even if it reaches a full release or even if it does I think we would probably want to expand on it,” Hall said.

This presents a whole new challenge to the development team at Bohemia Interactive.

“So the challenge there is to come up with enough features and content that people are happy to pay out €10, €15 for an additional product when they’ve already spent €20 on ARAMA II,” Hall said.

No official pricing information has been disclosed, but Hall assured Digital Spy it will be based on “content we put into it”. He also made sure to point out “it needs to be community supported and they need to be behind it.”

Bohemia plans to steer clear of the increasingly popular free-to-play model, which may actually save Day Z fans money.

“We probably could make a lot more money going free-to-play but it would destroy the experiment a bit,” Hall said.

The standalone Day Z will have an alpha release with free updates going forward. The mod, which was released this past April, has fueled the sale of around 300,000 copies of ARMA II.