EA Shutters Battlefield Heroes, Other F2P Titles

[Steven Bogos]

EA Shutters Battlefield Heroes, Other F2P Titles

EA is closing down servers for the free-to-play PC shooter: Battlefield Heroes.

coming up short [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/tag/view/battlefield+heroes]. Now, it looks like EA are ready to pull the plug, announcing plans to shut down Battlefield Heroes servers permanently.

Additionally, three other F2P EA games - Battlefield Play4Free, Need for Speed World, and FIFA World - are also getting shut down. The games will be shuttered on Tuesday, July 14, 2015.

"In more than five years since most of these titles launched, how we play games has changed dramatically," wrote EA Studios EVP Patrick Söderlund in a lengthy blog post [http://www.battlefieldheroes.com/en/forum/showthread.php?tid=505380]. "Those of you who still have a balance of in-game currency are encouraged to spend it before the game is no longer available on Tuesday July 14th 2015. Additionally, from now until the closing date we will also be disabling the functionality to purchase Play4Free Funds, as well as the ability to register new accounts."

"Battlefield Heroes is an older title that is not as popular as it once was. It has been a great experience, and we know some loyal fans will be disappointed, but we felt it was the right time to retire this veteran game."

The blog does feature a short FAQ but it essentially sums up to "everything will be lost and you'll never be able to play this game again. No refunds."

So, that's another four games forever lost to the ether, at least until some dedicated fans can figure out a way to bring them back from the dead.

Source: EA Games [http://www.battlefieldheroes.com/en/forum/showthread.php?tid=505380]

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[snekadid]

This is undoubtedly another great move by EA to improve gaming. They're OBVIOUSLY closing all these games to never be played again as a message to the ESA about what could happen if games are not allowed to be maintained for future generations. Thank god for EA and its pure intentions.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

This is undoubtedly another great move by EA to improve gaming. They're OBVIOUSLY closing all these games to never be played again as a message to the ESA about what could happen if games are not allowed to be maintained for future generations. Thank god for EA and its pure intentions.

To be fair, pretty much nobody played Battlefield Heroes after they completely fucked the microtransactions.

 

[Sir Thomas Sean Connery]

[img/]http://images2.fanpop.com/images/user_images/DanBackslide-405348_604_358.jpg[/img]

At least EA isn't trying to open MORE Free to Play games. They're mostly garbage and they take the place of real sequels that might actually be good.

 

[Grumman]

At least EA isn't trying to open MORE Free to Play games. They're mostly garbage and they take the place of real sequels that might actually be good.

Just the F2P games? It seems to me that that's their entire business strategy: buy things people liked and turn them into unholy abominations, begging for death.

 

[gigastar]

At least EA isn't trying to open MORE Free to Play games. They're mostly garbage and they take the place of real sequels that might actually be good.

Im pretty sure the main development for theese games was handled by stuidios whom specialise in mobile games.

And there has never been a FIFA sequel. They just update the rosters and call it a new game.

 

[Naqel]

At least EA isn't trying to open MORE Free to Play games.

Why would they make F2P games if they already put micro-transactions into regular games.

 

[Grabehn]

I actually enjoyed this game quite a lot... Years ago, when they still hadn't completely fucked the micro-transactions. Now I couldn't care less for it going away.

 

[RicoADF]

And this is why games that require servers to run can fuck off, my PS1/2/3 games all work fine, as do my Pc games because I've avoided this shit.

 

[ASnogarD]

That is what you get when you sell power in a F2P title, then claim it had no effect and it was actually a profit inducing effect, and then go make long presentations on how the whiny masses will complain yet still support you.

Battlefield Heroes was actually a good game, fun and had some good ideas... needed s few tweaks here and there but ultimately a run title, until the money bags got hold of it and thought forcing player to pay or be perpetual losers was the best strategy for making money.
What really pissed me off was how the director even claimed that it was a good move and only a small minority complained, and the player base was happily blowing wads of money... hell he even had a presentation for other F2P devs, pay for power is good he claimed.

 

[fix-the-spade]

I remember this game.

It was really good, then EA realised after a couple of months that the unlocks and upgrades were attainable through gameplay in fairly reasonable time frames.

I response to this horrific scenario they upped the requirements so high and made the paid weapons so good that it became unplayable without feeding it a constant stream of money, I put it down and never played it again.

Very sad that yet another EA title has failed utterly due to short sighted money grab tactics.


As for FIFA WORLD, that only opened at the end of 2013, so it's lasted about as long as every EA sports game, way to commit to the product EA!

 

[Hero in a half shell]

I still play Battlefield Play4free every so often, it's not bad, but it had so much wasted potential. I wasn't surprised when they finally declared it would close.

Bit shocked that Battlefield Heroes is closing, it was always the favourite child.

The developers were scandalously bad at updating Play4Free. Major bugs present since it's first launch were never fixed, major balancing issues from terrible coding (at one point the helicopter was practically invincible due to it's firepower, and the jets have never ever been balanced)
They wouldn't make any happy holiday messages, they once completely forgot about their own anniversary. Never interacted in the forums, never took on any ideas from the suggestions pages, only actually updated the unbalanced weapons when a literal forum revolt was organised about a year and a half ago to actually fix the ridiculously overpowered new weapons that had been added.
(New weapons would always have super awesome stats, and go through a quiet nerf 3-4 months after release to balance them - once everyone had bought them and just before the next set of unbalanced weapons came out.)

Oh, they didn't have any hacking protection either - The community had to literally code an add-on blocklist to police the private servers because Punkbuster - The program that was supposed to perform hack detection - has been inherently broken for the last 2 or 3 years.

Their most recent gaffe was about a fortnight ago - for their 4 year anniversary everyone was supposed to get 4 supply drops for 1 credit each. Instead unlimited supply drops worth 1 credit each entered the store for about 4 hours, allowing people to mass buy hundreds and get probably thousands of pounds worth of items. Of course no response or message was given from the devs until 3 days after the incident, when they basically said "we messed up, so instead we are putting the same supply drop on the store for 2000 credits each.".
That sort of fiasco was present in everything they did.

I'll shed no tears, they mismanaged it greater than the guy responsible for adding lifeboats to the Titanic.

 

[Synthetica]

And they're not releasing the server files, heck, the source code for the entire thing because...

Spoiler

They're EA. What were you thinking?

 

[Glaice]

They only seem to care about their bottom line as opposed to actually supporting or helping customers who play their games it seems. As much as Origin may have better customer service than Steam, they lack in keeping the longevity of their older multiplayer games that don't have dedicated servers. There's nothing wrong in letting people who like those older games to be able to fire up a listen or dedicated server than have to play Generic Multiplayer Military Shooter #500 for their fix.

Greed and bad business practices will undoubtedly cause the Crash 2.0 sooner or later.

 

[wetfart]

So do we want to start a clock or something to see how long until the studios that developed them go under, too?

 

[Arnoxthe1]

Hm... It actually looks like EA is slowly beginning to clean up their act. Ever since the CEO switchup, they've been getting less and less nasty. So that's good.

 

[Muspelheim]

Poor dear Battlefield Heroes... You never got a fair chance in life. Never got a chance to be all you could be. It's just another hard fact of the business, but it doesn't make it any less sad.

It was great fun in the beginning. I only hope someone else passes the torch along.

Rest in Peace, Sweet Boy, for Thy Troubles are Over.

EDIT: Bloody hell, did this get sappy... I think I cared way more about Battlefield Heroes than I thought.

 

[RicoADF]

I'll shed no tears, they mismanaged it greater than the guy responsible for adding lifeboats to the Titanic.

Fun fact, the Titanic was designed to have enough lifeboats for all outboard, it was the businessmen that demanded their removal to improve the view for passenger.

You can see how Titanic was supposed to be equipped by looking up pics of the Olympic after the disaster (one of Titanic's sisters), see below:

 

[Jandau]

I'm fine with this. Sure, sucks for the people who lose out on time and money invested, but it might illustrate the dangers of endlessly pumping your money into a bottomless pit, based on blind trust towards a faceless corporation...