Battlefield Heroes

» see battlefieldheroes.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A Battlefield game you started from a web page was not an obvious idea in 2009. You went to battlefieldheroes.com, signed in, and a plugin pulled the game down and ran it. No box and no disc, and the whole thing engineered to start on a laptop with integrated graphics.

DICE built it with Easy Studios, the free-to-play arm EA had set up in Stockholm, and it shipped on 25 June 2009 after a long beta. The art was deliberately cartoonish, big heads and bright colors, partly for the tone and mostly because a low-detail style let the hardware floor drop through the basement. It kept the classes and the vehicles and threw out everything else that made a Battlefield expensive to run.

The numbers arrived fast. Seven million registered accounts by March 2011, ten million by January 2012. That is a lot of people for a game that lived in a browser window, and reaching them was the entire point. EA was aiming below the graphics-card line, at the computer a household already owned.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the valor points revolt ~

On 30 November 2009, five months after launch, EA changed the prices. Items bought with Valor Points, the currency you earned by playing, got more expensive. Items bought with Play 4 Free Funds, the currency you bought with a card, got cheaper. The distance between playing and paying widened inside a single patch.

Ars Technica wrote at the time that the update had a very real chance of ending the game. It did not, and the account numbers climbed for two more years, but the argument it started never went away. Nobody objected to a shop existing in a free game. They objected to the shop being quietly moved closer after they had already put their hours in on the free side.

~ the plugin problem ~

Launching from a browser was the selling point and it was also a clock. The game needed a downloadable plugin, which meant it lived on whatever browsers were still willing to let plugins do. Between 2009 and 2015 the answer to that question changed completely. Chrome began pulling NPAPI support in 2014 and the rest of the web went the same direction.

Whether any of that fed into EA's decision is not on the record. What is on the record is that the delivery mechanism which made Battlefield Heroes possible in the first place was being removed from the web while the game was still running on it.

~ four games, one date ~

On 15 April 2015 EA posted that Battlefield Heroes would close on 14 July. Three other PC titles got the same notice on the same day: Battlefield Play4Free, FIFA World and Need for Speed World. New purchases stopped straight away and unspent currency was not refunded or converted into anything, which is the standard ending for this shape of product.

EA's wording was that some of its PC free-to-play games were not as popular as they once were. Ten million registered accounts is a large number to file under that sentence, though registered accounts and players still logging in six years later are two very different figures, and EA was the only party who could see the second one.

~ what is still running ~

I was 25 when it launched and long past the age where a free browser shooter was going to take my evenings. By 2009 my machine ran whatever I pointed it at, which cancelled out the one real advantage the game had. Battlefield Heroes was built for the computer somebody's family already owned. That was an enormous market and I was not in it.

Fan servers keep it playable today, reverse engineered by people who wanted it back badly enough to rebuild the backend themselves. Nearly every free-to-play shutdown of that era has produced one, which is the only reliable preservation this whole category has ever had.

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