There's a Ben Cousins Q&A on GamesIndustry.biz talking with the executive producer on Battlefield Heroes about DICE's subscription-free multiplayer shooter. Topics include how they've scaled battles back to 16 players (they will look at expanding this to 64 over time), what they've learned from beta testing, appealing to less hardcore players, and more. Most interesting is a bit highlighted in a separate post about the game's release plans, as Ben says there is not going to be a dramatic launch of the game one day, but rather the closed beta will continue to expand to the point that "every hardcore gamer in the world will probably be able to get a key if they want to - it would just be within a closed beta so that we can control the size of it to a degree." To that end, he takes issue with the idea that the game is delayed from its summer release, saying "Actually, we're in the closed beta already, so the game is already out and you can't delay a game that's already been released and already been played by people." He describes social networking features to be added over the course of the beta, and on whether the game will miss out on not having a big splashy "release," he calls Heroes "a modern web product" in the vein of Facebook or Wikipedia, which did not have big launch moments, saying "These things grow over time and become enormous by the network effect rather than having to rely on traditional marketing methods, where obviously you bank of all your money in a particular three-week period and try and get in front of everybody. We've got the luxury of using the internet to spread the word about it - not relying on that critical period of communication about the game."