The free-to-play Battlefield Heroes model is a new one in this hemisphere, at least with a major franchise like Battlefield. Companies have blamed piracy more and more for the reasons for more heavily enforcing DRM and shifting to console development. And it impacted the way Battlefield Heroes‘ model came about, but not in the way you’d think.

You might remember this trailer I posted about in late February that made a quip about downloading the game on BitTorrent. Speaking with DICE executive producer Ben Cousins, GI.biz asked about the joke and if piracy had any effect on Heroes.

If you look at Korea - and really the idea for Battlefield Heroes came from a business trip to South Korea that a couple of guys had a few years ago - Korea and China are markets which are basically killed by piracy on the console side and on the PC side.

As a result this free-to-play model kind of came because people were used to not paying for their games because they were pirating them.

The companies started offering them for free and started monetizing it with micro-transactions. I don’t know whether DICE has been driven by piracy in our games - it’s certainly a problem but we do quite well anyway. It was more the case that the business model itself originally came from piracy back in the old days.

In that movie [the Battlefield Heroes trailer]…I think it’s important - I wrote the script for that movie - that we address the fact the piracy exists and there’s no point in hiding under the carpet or just sweeping it under the carpet.

Piracy is out there and the industry needs to find ways of dealing with it, and one of the ways is free-to-play games.

I’m so excited to get my hands on Heroes. Everything about it fascinates me, from the business model to the gameplay. And you can’t go wrong with something that’s free.

---
Related Articles at Gaming Today:

• Gods and Heroes Exclusive Video Dev Diary: Favorite Experience
• City of Heroes Spring Fling
• Mike Capps Doesn’t Like Developers Having Free Rein
• Vanguard: Saga of Heroes Darrin McPherson Video Interview
• City of Heroes Serving Up Double XP Weekend and More