EverQuest Next Landmark has announced that closed beta will start on March 26th. EverQuest Next Landmark, for those who don’t know, is a hotly anticipated online social building game linked to EverQuest Next. For example, from the blurb :

This is your chance to help build a game! Build alone or in groups to create Landmarks. Join massive construction contests and your creations could last forever. The best buildings players create will become permanent fixtures in the EverQuest Next world.

It’s a sandbox game, you can build with their tools and people have been happily building away during the Alpha process, now it’s getting close to Beta time.

There will also be opportunities for people to sell their wares for real cash via the Sony Online Entertainment Player Studio, although this will initially be restricted to those in the United States the plan is to extend this to other countries, it should also be noted that sales via the Player Studio will be for multiple games, so content creators may see plenty of opportunities.

There’s a rather epic forum post discussing the business of EverQuest Next Landmark, it’s a free to play title so selling items and encouraging people to purchase items and subscriptions will be important. The opening post, from an official bod, also discusses players selling items :

Phase 4: We launch Player Studio. At that point, all of our players can start submitting templates to the store and letting other players buy them. This should occur early during Closed Beta.

Hopefully that means people from outside the United States will be able to sell items. However it should be pointed out there’s a rather hefty commission fee for selling goods this way:

SOE will share 40% of the net amount it receives from the sale of the item with the player that created the item.

Plenty of content creators will baulk at that, but opportunity knocks for those who think it’s a reasonable trade off between reach and sales. Time will tell whether it’s a success but it’s encouraging to see other products offering content creators the option to sell their own wares.

There are a couple of ways of getting into closed beta, you can purchase a Founder’s Packs, which gives you unlimited access to the Landmark Closed Beta or you can apply to acquire a Time-Limited Closed Beta Key, which is a free method of getting into the Closed Beta, but is far more limited than the Founder’s Packs options.

Founder’s Packs come in three varieties, priced at $19.99, $59.99 and $99.99. All three varieties will allow you full closed beta access. The packs are:

Settler Pack – $19.99

• Unlimited Closed Beta Access
• Settler Flag ItemPlant your flag in EQ/EQII
• Founder’s Pickaxe
• Title: Founder
• Forum Title: Founder

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