14 DAY TRIAL // Ben Cousins is senior producer of Battlefield Heroes and he talks about how careful observation of the South Korean games market leads to the free-to-play model being adopted for Battlefield Heroes and about how the developers came up with a cartoon look for the MMO game.
Cousins took some time to sit down with Gamasutra and share his knowledge of the game. Apparently, advertising will only be on the game website and not in the game itself and more money is expected to come from micro-transaction, which means players that buy additional equipment and weapons will have a better shot at glory. Cousins says that "if you look at what's happened in South Korea over the recent years, there's this new business model which has cropped up, which is games which are free-to-play, but where a certain proportion of the audience buy items."
Two categories of upgrades will be available. One will be pure customization, with things like monocles and mustaches up for grabs, while the other will consist of perks that can increase the XP revenue for a player for a period of time, making it easier to casual gamers to keep up with the game flow.
Payments for the game could come in very different ways, depending on the location of the player and his preferences. Although pre-paid cards and on-site transactions are possible, there could also be SMS messages and an option to have the cost of the game transactions added to your Internet provider bill.
The cartoon-like feeling of the new game was created to "deliberately contrast with ourself, because we've got two very successful games out there -- there are still hundreds of thousands of people out there playing BF2 and Battlefield 2142, and we didn't want to confuse them by creating yet another realistic-looking game."
The producer also emphasizes the way the PC is really a good game platform, as long as the games themselves take advantage of the spread of PCs and their connectivity capabilities.