What is it?
Playing to Win? - Battlefield Heroes, Virtual Goods, and Selling Gameplay Advantages, hosted by Ben Cousins of Easy.
What did I expect?
An in-depth examination of the success and struggles of EA's first Free to Play game, Battlefield Heroes, and a look forward to the upcoming Battlefield Play4Free.
What did I learn?
-Easy eventually realized that many players were maintaining multiple fully outfitted characters, or had put in 100+ hours of game time into Battlefield Heroes, without paying a cent. In response, Easy raised the price of permanent weapons, and offered exclusive, balanced perks to paid weapons in late 2009, and apparently alienating many players in the process. Cousins cited angry forum posts, e-mails, and news posts from various games press sites.
-Easy learned many free-to-play basics from Korean game developer Neowiz, including customizable clothing, emotes, and convenience items. Cousins would go on to state that, at the beginning of Heroes' life-cycle, Easy was insufficiently prepared to tackle a Western free-to-play market.
-There were early plans to sell players permanent weapons in Battlefield Heroes, but after some vocal negative feedback from the gaming community over leaked information about the same idea being implemented into the Battlefield: Bad Company beta, those plans were scaled back, and eventually shelved.
-In a later market poll, 44% of Battlefield Heroes players requested the ability to purchase permanent weapons with in-game funds.
-Despite the negative forum outcry and press response to the raised weapon prices, Heroes saw an impressive increase in their revenue stream after they implemented the changes. It was later realized that only 2% of the Battlefield Heroes userbase actually read and posted on the game's forums, where over 70% played the game and never touched the forums. Later, when that 2% was matched to the revenue stream, it was discovered that the forum posters actually spent ten times more than the average user.
Pull quotes:
-"I hope you're happy, Ben. I hope you're really, really happy. Do you know how many children you ruined Christmas for, Ben?" Angry e-mail sent to Ben Cousins, Easy, after raised in-game item prices
"We eventually realized that the forums didn't represent our players as a whole, but they represented a small, passionate subset of our players." Ben Cousins, EA
"The success of Battlefield Heroes has given us the opportunity to create an HD game based on the same business model in Battlefield Play4Free, a free to play version of Battlefield 2." Ben Cousins, EA
Source: Daily News from GamePro.com
Thursday, March 3, 2011