EA has been experimenting with the notion of downloadable content regarding the Battlefield series as of late. Players voiced their opinions loudly against weapons purchasing DLC for the latest installment in the series, Battlefield: Bad Company. On the flipside, Battlefield Heroes will be free for everyone to play and will be supported by in-game ad revenue. It appears however that there are indeed more Battlefield games being made at the moment.
According to reports from the GDC even in Paris, EA’s DICE studio executive producer Ben Cousins said that they’re currently at work on five games in the series in total, including Heroes and Bad Company. The team is also at work on three other games based on the series, including a traditional core game aimed at consoles, and a new collaboration with Neowiz specifically for the Korean market.
"Since the start of this year I’ve been working as executive producer for the entire Battlefield franchise – we’ve got five titles in development at the moment, which is probably more than you expect," Cousins told the GDC Paris audience during his keynote presentation.
When asked why EA and DICE wanted to make a free game for everyone to play, Cousins said:
"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. 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"
[via gamesindustry]
