The official BFH website does not speak about applying to the beta however a few community fans sites are now displaying the link where to apply for Battlefield Heroes Beta!!!!

The highly Anticipated Free Game from Electronic Arts and DICE - Battlefield Heroes is just right around the corner! Would you like to start kicking the tires on Battlefield Heroes right now. Well you can!

Your Personal Invitation to test the Beta of Battlefield Heroes is here Click on the link below to apply

Applied and waiting :D

Battlefield Heroes is gaining a lot of popularity lately. So much in fact, that their website crashed due to all the traffic. Community Manager Goodman clarify a couple of things in regards to the public sign up for closed beta and how they are handling the testing of the more serious bugs.

As you may have noticed, you killed our website. We are not angry. We’re very pleased you want to be in the Beta.

The beta for Heroes will be divided into several stages, the first of which is all about testing out this new way of getting games to you all; by downloading and installing them from a website. We’ll also be trying out some other dull stuff to do with servers, so we are expecting the systems to be down as much as they are up.

To help us track down all the technical issues, we have asked a third party to find us some specialist Beta testers. We are doing all this because we want to be sure that when we launch Heroes, everything will work smoothly.

So hang in there! We will announce here when it’s time to sign up for the public stage of the Beta.

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Battlefield Heroes™ is a brand new Play 4 Free game from the people that brought you the multi-million selling Battlefield 1942™ and Battlefield 2™. It’s a fun cartoon-style shooter which caters to players of all skill levels — easy to pick up and play, but with deep character development.It will be released for the PC as a free download in Summer 2008.

The game will start taking beta application soon and the first close beta will start May 6th.

Enjoy!

Alright, so I discovered this after reading David’s post up over Here. This both amuses and surprises me. It amuses me because a lot of people saw that eventually the big companies would eventually make the leap into free game model market. It surprises me that it’s EA that’s taking the plunge. Considering EA’s history, perhaps it’s just some amount of that cynical me peeking out from the shadows, knowing that they’ve made some very large game screw ups in the past. At least that’s a opinion anyways, that they’ve screwed up some games and what not in recent years.

Now of course that doesn’t mean this new step is going to be a sweeping success, but the thing about F2P games, if it’s complete crap, people might play it anyway just cause it’s free and they still may drop money for these things. Fascinating how that works sometimes, so while it’s a big step and perhaps might kick of a war with retailers it makes a kind of sense to me to edge towards this market that’s growing every year, just that it’s limited by the offerings that we have in the West so far.

Will this spark a big trend change in the Industry? Probably, but it won’t be right away, the old boys club still had to sit and piss and moan about change and some companies are going to just hide behind their blast doors and wait to see what happens. There’s a problem with that though. Firstly that means there will be a slow trickle of a new generation of free games coming out, which of course sucks in terms of diversity. On the other hand, if EA and anyone else of the big boys takes the step and really hit it off big, then we’ll see a virtual flood of new free western games, which will then offer to much, leave our heads spinning and the profits for these companies may appear disappointing at first. (Not that I much mind that part) But still, they’ll have a knee-jerk reaction and think they made a mistake. Hopefully they’ll clue in and remember that new market explosions take time to settle down after the initial feeding frenzy.

Either way, with EA’s announcement, I think it’s safe to say the chum’s in the water, and we’ll start smelling blood soon enough.