MARCH 31, 2011 • Ben Cousins, the general manager of Electronic Arts’ free-to-play division, has announced that he was leaving the publisher. Responsible for shepherding the recent release of Battlefield Play4Free, Cousins wrote on his Twitter account that it was time for him to leave with the release of the game. The earlier Battlefield Heroes has more than 7 million registered users.
Impact: The challenge with free-to-play ifor a company like Electronic Arts is the overall revenue is still quite low. Asian companies have the benefit of having a large user base in their regions that can fund porting a product to the much smaller markets of North America and Europe. A number like 7 million users sounds like a lot, but when the game is free that is actually fairly small, especially for a company like EA that is used to products that sell in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
