14 DAY TRIAL // Ben Cousens, who is the leader of the development studio that is creating the upcoming shooter Battlefield Play4Free, says that his company has determined that all gamers engaging with the genre are hardcore in their own way, competitive and interested in comparing their performance with that of other players.
Cousens says that Battlefield Heroes, a free-to-play browser-based shooter with a cartoon-like look, “was an experiment to discover if there is such a thing as a casual shooter fan.”
He added, “And the result of the experiment is that there is no such thing as a casual shooter fan. So 75 percent of our players on Heroes are core shooter fans.”
Cousens says that publisher Electronic Arts has done research involving those who play Battlefield Heroes and has found that they are playing the online game in addition to other games from the same genre on the PC and on home consoles.
The main limitation for shooter fans is the money they can spend on video games so they tend to only pick up a core, 60-dollar priced game once every few months, playing it as much as possible while complementing their experience by going online and trying out free-to-play first-person shooters.
Cousens believes that this kind of audience is prepared to try out and commit to Battlefield Play4Free, the free-to-play game that Electronic Arts is preparing to release on April 4.
The game uses the same mechanics and the same maps seen in Battlefield 2, with some assets taken from the console-only Battlefield Bad Company 2.
The game is free to those who want to see what it's all about but the developers believe that hardcore players will be interested in getting more out of the experience and will pay for that.