The numbers don’t lie.  The free to play, microtransaction based gaming business model works.  It not only works, but it’s making lots and lots of people lots and lots of money.  The North American market has been less than speedy in accepting this form of play.

Nexon entered the market first, and brought titles like Kart Rider and Maplestory to an audience that had never experienced this form of play.  So when big guns EA went out on the ledge and said, “Hey…we’re going to build a top notch game, able to hold it’s own at any shooter table, oh…and it’ll be free to play,” the reception was a bit lukewarm.  Granted, this has to do with the title not actually being ‘out’ on the market yet, but as momentum begins to grow, I’ve personally noticed more and more ‘w00t!  can’t wait to get my hands on this!’ comments springing up across the myriad of sites I cover each day.

Now I’m not about to put myself in the same category as David Perry, but it seems that we’re thinking the same thing on this one.  Perry recently sat down with GamesIndustry.biz and let the fan flag fly.  “I think Battlefield Heroes is going to be a huge hit, it’s going to be a bit of a phenomenon.  I have incredible faith that EA is going to pull this off.”  Perry continued, believing that most people are underestimating the project.   “For them to actually make that announcement was huge, I thought that was one of the biggest statements that EA has made in years and it just went over people’s heads.”

Building upon this, Perry noted that EA is still at heart, a retail company.  The make games, produce them, put them in pretty boxes and ship them off to retailers to them put their tax on, and pass along to the consumer.  Announcing a free-to-play, download it if you like game is not a great relationship builder with said retail outlets.  EA has already invested in the Korean market and The9 in China, but keeping it under the radar.  Battlefield Heroes is in fact, NOT EA’s first free-to-play, but rather the one that most North Americans have heard of.  EA built FIFA Online as a free MMO.  A smart move to test the international waters, as most North Americans favor their football involving a brown pigskin and not the round black and white ball the rest of the world sees as a football.

When asked about the free-to-play model itself, Perry said that the model actually allows for the potential of even more revenue generated compared to the traditional model.  “It’s a whole different world you enter when you get into free-to-play, it’s like the industry that we’ve all been missing and the second thing we’ve been missing is the idea of letting people pay what they want,” he explained.

“I’ve made so many games and we never, ever had the idea that people would pay more than the price of the game for the game, no one would pay over $60 if it’s a $60 game. On our 2Moons game, you’ve got people that spend $3,000 happily, and if we had more stuff for them to buy, they would buy it.”

As a point of comparison, most retail games sell for around $60, while Acclaim’s free to play games average a $75 take/person/game.