Battlefield Heroes Solves the Piracy Problem: Drop the Price

EA’s latest Battlefield offering, Battlefield: Heroes, has a refreshingly unique twist: it’s free to play. That’s right; you don’t have to shell out $30-$50 for the online, multiplayer, FPS action. There’s not even a monthly fee like Age of Conan and WoW. Instead of making players pay for the software, EA is letting players play for free with the ability to purchase upgrades and customization options. While it’s not the first game on the planet to do this, it is certainly among few and is one of the biggest to try this out.

It seems that EA is taking a new approach to the whole online piracy thing. They are making piracy moot by removing its biggest incentive: the price.  Battlefield: Heroes addresses what I have come to realize is the largest problem with media today: the cost of software and other media is outrageously high. At $60 a game, $18 for a new CD, and $11 for a movie, entertainment isn’t cheap these days.

Which I suppose is fine for people with expendable income. But for the rest of us, a game like Battlefield: Heroes offers a great solution. It delivers a full game, monetized through advertisements before the playing and on the website (but thankfully none in-play). Meanwhile, if gamers decide they’re willing to pay for a more robust experience, they can simply pay for the extras they want. Since these extras don’t give any gameplay advantages, the game remains balanced while still adding extra revenue for the company.

This new direction, with its focus on making the game accessible to a broad audience, shows that EA is catching on where the RIAA isn’t. The people pirating are not a new breed of tech-savvy criminals that don’t understand the concept of money. They’re regular people: the new generation of TV watchers and radio listeners accustomed to certain things. Over the air TV and radio is essentially free. They offer the opportunity for casual consumers to get tons of media for the mere cost of putting up with a few commercials. Meanwhile, the Internet provides tons of specific, desired, “on demand” content at the push of a button.

The real problem is that publishers haven’t figured out how to monetize on demand media without charging a la carte and taking money right out of the wallets of the casual consumers. This, in turn, pushes the people to their computer to get it off Limewire or Pirate Bay. But if content becomes affordable and worth the cost, consumers are willing to pay.

If you doubt this, look at the success of the Wii over its competitors. It’s roughly half the price to buy the system. And because it has a lot of simple games at low costs, casual consumers buy the products at astounding rates. The Wii and Battlefield: Heroes are solving the problem of online piracy: lower entertainment costs on the consumers’ end. Another developing success story is Hulu.com. The website offers computer users a long list of TV shows and movies to watch for the price of a handful of commercials. It’s basically TV on your computer, but you watch the shows when you want to.

Once content providers are able to give that sort of access to the average TV viewer, video piracy will no longer be the problem it is today. The same effect will occur when applied to music. If users were able to listen to the songs and artists they wanted for the cost of radio commercials, then they’d be less apt to illegally download. For example, you can pick the songs you want to listen to in your car, instead of what the DJ plays, at the cost of listening to a few commercials. Computer games are no exception, and that’s why I applaud EA for getting creative with Battlefield: Heroes. This is a step in the right direction to curb piracy. Instead of locking up a product so it’s impossible for even the fans to use, open it up as much as possible and find alternate ways of generating revenue.