The idea came from the founders making $5 bets with each other over who could kill who. The idea behind Bounty is that you buy lives with zombies, other survivors and bandits worth cents per kill.
The group aren’t in this for profit, they argue. They’d like DayZ Bounty to be a rather democratic process with paying members deciding its future. It’s not reached alpha yet.
”We started a kind of hero clan, ‘Super Hero Medic Squad.’ All we did was try and help people,” recalls DayZ Bounty founder, Jake Stewart. “One night, we got drunk and started messing around, and I was like, ‘Screw it. I’m bored. I’m tired of helping people. I’m going rogue.’ We all started killing each other.” This led to some friendly bets.
“I’ll give you five dollars if you can take me out,” he continues. “And all of a sudden, I thought: this is a fun way to play. This’d be great if we had a whole community of people that were doing the same type of thing.”
Stewart and fellow founder James Ortiz ”had talked about maybe getting it together. I started messing around with the map editing and things like that, and he started working on the server end of things. I’d done map editing and other things in Oblivion and a lot of the older Elder Scrolls games.” DayZ Bounty uses a ‘re-imagined’ Chernarus which includes ”greater detail, more realistic military presence,” and other features.
Players buy ‘packages’ which are valued at $5, $10, $15 or $20 which grant a number of lives, which includes basic gear. Killing zombies, survivors and bandits earns varying amounts of money. The bandit with the most kills earns the rank of ‘outlaw’ which is worth a lot more. ”We haven’t gone through alpha yet, and that’s when we’re going to start doing all the mock money before we set prices,” says Ortiz. “We’re basically trying to keep all the money in-game, where there’s no overflow of cash, but we’re not spending money to do it as well,” added Stewart.
The Bounty team have their own way to verify kills by using a third-party program. “We have a program that registers all kinds of kills. Headshots, all that stuff,” explained Ortiz. “It’s the same way all that is registered within the game already, but we have a program that records it all. The player ID, their name, who they killed, what they killed, when they killed it.”
Payments to players would be processed through PayPal. Presently the bounties are:
• Zombies: $0.10 per 10 killed
• Survivors: $0.05
• Bandits: $0.25
• The Outlaw: $5.00, with value on their head increasing $0.25 per hour of in-game time
DayZ Bounty founders Jake Stewart, James Ortiz and Andrew Defee don’t want the size of their community to get too large to manage. “It comes down to community. We want them to speak up if things are going on in the game that they see. They can speak up and say, ‘Hey, I saw this guy teleporting around.’ ‘I saw this guy camping on a spawn point and killing people.’ We’re trying to be as open with them as they are with us. We want it to be one big happy family.”
Check out the full interview between Dayz Bounty founders and PC Gamer. Visit the official website.
