We got our first look at EA’s free-to-play ‘Battlefield Heroes’ last week at the Games Convention in Leipzig.  While I’ll admit, I didn’t spend as much time with the game as I’d like, I did return the next day to sit down with BH again the next day – a clear signal that EA is doing something right, as I was/am already addicted to this seemingly simple game.

There’s been a whole lot of noise over the past few days regarding BH, with everyone from gamespy to arstechnica to wired has written about the ‘already out’ Battlefield Heroes.  While this comes to a surprise to some, if you think about it, it really shouldn’t.  Since Battlefield Heroes is a free to play title, what exactly is EA selling?  In essence, for now at least, EA is selling only advertising space.  So in theory, they could release the product at any point in time with as little or as great fanfare as they so choose.  Producer Ben Cousins says that the game is essential “already out”, but has been a steady ramp up and release in bits and pieces.  The ‘official’ pomp and circumstance release is slated for the end of 2008 when all the facebook style social networking features will be implemented.

What does this mean for EA’s first foray into the free to play space?  By slowly releasing bits and pieces and letting more and more players in without calling the product ‘officially’ released, EA is playing it safe.  Not a bad move when you’re testing the waters of an unknown/unaccepted business model.  Let’s think of the BH ‘beta’ along the lines of Gmail and Flickr.  Google’s Gmail is still technically in beta, but grew virally by allowing one user to invite a number of other users.  Battlefield Heroes is following more or less the same path as Gmail (sans the ‘a friend can invite you in’ factor), Facebook, and Wikipedia.  That is to say – viral marketing.

While more and more reviews and thoughts and opinions are released surrounding Battlefield Heroes, there are a few key phrases that stick out: Fun, Addictive, Back for more.  In the untested Western waters of free-to-play, microtransaction, and in-game advertising world, this is music to our ears.