EA wants to make free-to-play versions of everything they sell

Battlefield Play4Free is the free-to-play version of Battlefield 3. It’s the Cousin Oliver of EA’s tentpole shooter franchise. It’s smaller than Battlefield 3, the shooting isn’t as satisfying, and the grind is annoying. But, hey! It’s free. I’m sure that it must attract some people just based on the initial price barrier being $0, just as there are fans of Robbie Rist’s character in The Brady Bunch. There’s always someone willing to play a free game.

Peter Moore told Engadget that we can expect free-to-play versions of every major game EA publishes. He emphasized the success of existing F2P tie-ins to Battlefield and FIFA and said that EA will not release any games without an online component.

“We don’t ship a game at EA that is offline. It just doesn’t happen. And gamers either want to be connected so their stats and achievements reflect who they are, or you want the full multiplayer experience on top of that. We don’t deliver offline experiences anymore.”

“The ability for you to be able to interact with those franchises on a free-to-play basis is going to be part-and-parcel with every major franchise we do now.”

Moore has been a major champion of shifting EA’s focus exclusively from retail disks to games as a service.