EA shutting down Battlefield Heroes and three other F2P games

Battlefield Heroes once represented huge hopes for EA -- but it's now due to be shuttered, the company announced in a new blog post. The free-to-play PC game, which started as an experiment and later led to the formation of a new EA division, is being shut down alongside three other EA F2P games: Battlefield Play4Free, Need for Speed World, and FIFA World.

"In more than five years since most of these titles launched, how we play games has changed dramatically," wrote EA Studios EVP Patrick Söderlund.

At one point, free-to-play PC games seemed to be a big part of EA's future -- hitting 25 million registered users in 2012 across its suite of games -- but of late the company has not been kind to them. It shut down its MOBA, Dawngate, after 18 months of beta, and canceled BioWare Austin's in-development Shadow Realms.

Battlefield Heroes was a particularly interesting project because it revealed a lot about PC players' attitudes toward free-to-play -- and Western developers' experiences working on a game using the model. 

The affected games will continue to operate for 90 days before EA pulls them down.