Interview: We chat with Battlefield Play4Free's general manager about taking the game in new directions, and making money in a free environment.
We sat down with Ben Cousins (no, not *that* Ben Cousins), general manager of Battlefield Play4Free, at the Battlefield 3 event in not-so-sunny San Francisco to talk about the latest free-to-play first-person shooter. In reality, the game may as well be branded ‘Battlefield 2 Play4Free’ as it’s essentially a very close reimagining of Battlefield 2. If you’ve got no idea what the play-for-free model is all about and haven’t been following this title particular closely, this interview is a good place to start as it focusses on a very entry-level understanding of how it all works. Check out or discussion with Ben below where we talk about Battlefield Play4Free, how to sift information from bitching gamers and links between Play4Free and Battlefield 3.
Atomic: Can you give me the basic spiel for Battlefield Play4Free?
Ben: What we’ve done is we’ve taken the free-to-play shooter to the next level. And we really are putting a stake in the ground saying, ‘We believe the free-to-play business is gonna be HD, high quality, deep, AAA.’ And we’re taking it to the next level. And the reason we’re doing this is because we’ve seen huge success with Battlefield Heroes; 7 million people have played that game, so it’s bigger than the population of Sweden almost, which is where the game is developed. And we saw that this is working. Western gamers enjoy it, we’ve got a business model that people like and it’s just making us enough money to continue to develop the game, so why not blow it out and take it to the next level?
Atomic: Right. So, obviously Battlefield Heroes was a cutesy sort of cartoony thing and you’re going back to more of a real thing with Battlefield Play4Free; how does that impact the tone and the sort of audience you’re aiming for?
Ben: So the interesting thing with BF Heroes is we had this high-minded idea that we could find a casual shooter market... they don’t exist.
Atomic: Right.
Ben: We know that. And that was the result of our experiment. There aren’t any of those people out there. Seventy-five percent of the people that played BF Heroes are core shooter fans.
Ben: Yeah. So we decided to make them the game that they probably wanted, which is more of a core experience; more of an HD, gritty experience. But really the gameplay and the structure of the experience is the same as Heroes. We’ve got an RPG focus, a character focus, unlocking abilities, unlocking equipment, it’s a long-term commitment to fully level-up your character; more an MMO progression. But then also lots of community and social features around the game playing with a friend for a really good sort of community feel.
Atomic: How do you guys deal with player retention? How do you guys retain the interest of us guys who go to the next thing if it offers a bigger bang?
Ben: So one of the things we do... this is why we’ve engineered this RPG style. We’ve got a training system and this is like a skill tree in any RPG. Y’know, if you want to get real good with explosives, you’ll unlock the explosives tree. If you wanna get really good physically, climb ladders faster, take less damage from falling, heal people, you can see how addictive this becomes. So maybe you’re playing the same map over and over and over, but you’re playing this meta game of, ‘How am I going to customise my character?’ And we create an end goal of, ‘I wanna be an assault guy, but I wanna be an assault guy who supports and shares information with the other players. Or I want to be an assault guy who is all about capturing and holding objectives.’ So a lot of the retention comes from this addictive RPG-type skill tree. And a lot of the retention comes from the community features and making it easier to play with your friends and encouraging people to play with their friends.
Atomic: So what sort of stuff do you have to encourage people to play with their friends?
Ben: We’ve got a friends system, every time you play it tells you what friends are playing. And it’s a single click to join them. This is also on the website as well. It’s very easy to add friends as well; just a single click to add a friend. And within the game itself, we reward you for cooperating. So if you’re playing a medic class—y’know, just like Bad Company 2—you drop down a health pack, other people are getting health from it and you gain points. You gain points so you level up quicker. So the days of the run-and-gun multiplayer shooter where the round was over, the game was over, is completely gone. There are several multiple meta-streams of gameplay happening at a time.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012