Battlefield Play4Free

» see battlefield.play4free.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

My shooter years ran from about 2002 to 2005 and they happened in internet cafes in Ankara, where the game was Counter-Strike and the payment model was an hourly rate you settled at the counter on the way out. Battlefield Play4Free arrived six years after that window closed. By 2011 I had a connection at home and a job, and the last thing I wanted out of a shooter was a shop.

The game opened on 4 April 2011 as an open beta and was still calling itself an open beta when the servers went off in 2015. Easy Studios in Stockholm built it, EA's free-to-play arm sitting next to DICE, and Electronic Arts published it as the eleventh entry in the Battlefield series. The engine was Refractor 2, the same one that had run Battlefield 2 back in 2005, cleaned up with higher resolution art and post-processing so it would still start on a machine nobody had upgraded since.

That choice was the entire product. Eight maps came straight out of Battlefield 2 and were released back into the world one at a time across 2011, Sharqi Peninsula on the day open beta started, Basra in June, Dragon Valley in August, Dalian just before Christmas. Servers held thirty-two players. The classes were Assault, Medic, Engineer and Recon, which is what the series had been running for years.

It was a competent shooter with a cash register bolted to the side. For a while that was enough for a lot of people who could not afford Bad Company 2 or could not run it.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

EA announced the game on 5 November 2010 and started putting closed beta codes into email inboxes at the end of that month. It was the second thing to go out under the Play4Free banner after Battlefield Heroes, which had been cartoonish where this one was deliberately not. The target was the machines that could not handle a current Battlefield, and in 2011 that was still most of the machines in most of the world.

Reviews came back as a shrug. Metacritic settled at 68 out of 100 across eleven reviews and IGN gave it a six. Almost nobody called it bad. Almost everybody called it Battlefield 2 with a store in front of it.

~ what you were actually paying for ~

There were two currencies. Credits came out of playing, earned for kills and captured objectives, and Play4Free Funds came out of your card. Weapons and camouflage could be rented with credits for anything from one day up to a month, somewhere between 350 and 1,000 credits a rental. Or you bought the item outright with Funds, and outright ran to roughly $7.85 apiece.

That is the number worth keeping. Around eight dollars for one gun, in a game whose whole pitch was that it did not cost anything. Anyone who wanted a permanent loadout was looking at the price of a boxed retail game, paid one weapon at a time, into a service that had made no promise about how long it would be there.

~ the day it died ~

On 15 April 2015 Easy Studios posted that services would end on 14 July. The same notice went out for three other Play4Free titles on the same date, which made it a lineup decision rather than a verdict on any one game. New accounts stopped straight away. Funds could no longer be bought, and the Funds people were already holding were not converted back into anything. Someone who had bought a permanent weapon in March owned it for four more months.

A change.org petition collected a little over 6,900 signatures and its organizer wrote to EA proposing alternatives to switching the servers off. Nothing came of it. The official account posted a thank-you on the last day and stopped.

~ the long tail ~

A community project called Phoenix Network later brought the game back on unofficial servers, which is now the only way to play it at all. That is the shape this whole class of game ends up in. The publisher owns the switch and the players own nothing they paid for. Some years after the switch gets thrown, a small group reverse engineers the thing and runs it for free out of pure stubbornness, which is more than the people who sold it were ever willing to do.

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