Kill counts have become the rage these days for first-person shooter games. Electronic Arts’ Battlefield 1943, an online-only World War II shooting game on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, is a perfect example of how you can use them to motivate players. On the official Battlefield 1943 web site, you can see the number of kills that have occurred in the game.
I’m starting to appreciate how game companies can use these kill counts for clever marketing purposes. Battlefield 1943 launched on July 8 on Microsoft’s Xbox Live for 1200 points, or $15, and on Sony’s PlayStation Network for the same price. Since that time, the game has recorded more than 22.3 million kills on the Xbox 360 and 12.5 million on the PS 3. On the leaderboard, a player with the nickname NON7 HE LESS is the leader, with 2,585 recorded kills over 27 hours. (Keep in mind the game has only been out five days.)
That shows a lot of engagement in a fairly short time, regardless of how many people have bought the game. There were 5 million kills on the first day, according to game developer Dice, a division of EA. All told, that added up to the equivalent of more than 29 years of game play, if you added up each player’s hours into a collective total. There were glitches in getting everyone into the game servers, but now it seems to be going fine.
The game comes with three maps: Wake Island, Guadalcanal, and Iwo Jima. You play either Japanese or American soldiers fighting in 12-person teams online. If the kill count tops 43 million, then EA will release a fourth map, Coral Sea. Presumably, this will keep on going as the kill counts rise. By the same token, if the kill counts start dying down, then that’s a sign the company should either release something new to spur sales, or give up on it and cut its losses. It marks the arrival of episodic business models, like in TV, where you only proceed with the next episode if the previous ones have been successful enough.
The pending release of the Coral Sea map gives a larger meaning to each death, even though the game is really just about you trying to stay alive for more than a minute or so on the battlefield. I’ve done my part to contribute as I started playing last night. I got about three kills in on each match. And I got killed many more times than that. It’s nice to know that my deaths have served a higher purpose.
The game is a fine addition to the Battlefield 1942 series that began way back in 2002. I’d like to know what the kill count has been since then.
As I mentioned, Electronic Arts isn’t the only company counting kills. Nexon America pointed out that it has seen 3.2 billion kills in a year on Combat Arms, and Bungie.net has had a running tally of 11 billion kills on its web site since Halo 3 launched in 2007.