Battlefield Heroes “already out”, according to DICE

Soft launches and extended beta programs seem to be all the rage, what with Google Mail being perpetually in said state, and Sony‘s PlayStation Home initiative apparently following the same route. EA’s free to play online shooter, Battlefield Heroes would seem to be next. Ben Cousins, executive producer at DICE states that the game’s “already out”, as there won’t be “big splash release”. Cousins expects the closed beta to grow rapidly, to the point that “every hardcore gamer in the world will probably be able to get a key if they want to”.

Hit the jump for more

Soft launches and extended beta programs seem to be all the rage, what with Google Mail being perpetually in said state, and Sony‘s PlayStation Home initiative apparently following the same route. EA’s free to play online shooter, Battlefield Heroes would seem to be next. Ben Cousins, executive producer at DICE states that the game’s “already out”, as there won’t be “big splash release”. Cousins expects the closed beta to grow rapidly, to the point that “every hardcore gamer in the world will probably be able to get a key if they want to”.

---

“We’re not going to turn on a switch one day and suddenly our audience gets 100 times bigger.

It’s really our plan, within the closed beta, to get a very high number of peak concurrent users and we expect in the later phases of the closed beta to be about as big as Bad Company is today in terms of online numbers.

We’re going to have a very large closed beta almost to the point where every hardcore gamer in the world will probably be able to get a key if they want to – it would just be within a closed beta so that we can control the size of it to a degree.

It’s an interesting difference between a packaged goods product, like our previous Battlefield games, in that there is no real kind of big splash release date where suddenly it’s available – it kind of builds up over time… The game will kind of sneak out and before you know it, it will be a fairly big game even though we’re in the closed beta and we’re not ‘released’.”

---

Fair enough, but only time will tell whether Battlefield Heroes, as Mr. David Perry Esq. so eloquently put it, will be a phenomenon.

So anyone out there have a beta account? Willing to share experiences?

---

Related Articles:

Earthworm Jim designer believes Battlefield Heroes will be a phenomenon
DICE: Battlefield Heroes to lead EA into free-to-play

Via Games Industry.biz