EA Flip-Flops On Battlefield: Heroes Pricing, Fans Angry

An anonymous reader writes "Ben Kuchera from Ars Technica is reporting that EA/DICE has substantially changed the game model of Battlefield: Heroes, increasing the cost of weapons in Valor Points (the in-game currency that you earn by playing) to levels that even hardcore players cannot afford, and making them available in BattleFunds (the in-game currency that you buy with real money). Other consumables in the game, such as bandages to heal the players, suffered the same fate, turning the game into a subscription or pay-to-play model if players want to remain competitive. This goes against the creators' earlier stated objectives of not providing combat advantage to paying customers. Ben Cousins, from EA/DICE, argued, 'We also frankly wanted to make buying Battlefunds more appealing. We have wages to pay here in the Heroes team and in order to keep a team large enough to make new free content like maps and other game features we need to increase the amount of BF that people buy. Battlefield Heroes is a business at the end of the day and for a company like EA who recently laid off 16% of their workforce, we need to keep an eye on the accounts and make sure we are doing our bit for the company.' The official forums discussion thread is full of angry responses from upset users, who feel this change is a betrayal of the original stated objectives of the game."

Comments

Re:So?

[Narpak]

Sorry, but paying to be playing competitively is something I'd expect in a F2P game with an ingame store, but not in a game that I buy at full price. No sale.

Battlefield Heroes is more like Quake Live; in that you can play the game for free through a web-browser interface. So you don't buy it "at full price" as such. Instead you create a character, log on, and play for free with some ads on the logon pages and such. However by playing, or paying, you get a type of points that you can use on certain types of items and gear; though these are not essential to playing as it is at the moment.

I believe that previous stated goal was to finance the game through ads and "micropayments"; so I really can't see why this change comes as any great surprise.