“Distribution of Battlefield Heroes on Aeria Games’ Network is a natural next step as we expand the Play4Free brand,” said Sean Decker, Vice President of EA’s Play4Free brand. “Aeria Games is a frontrunner in the free-to-play games business and our titles will benefit tremendously as they reach the ever-growing global market.”
While this is good news for Aeria's millions of fans, it's still a little strange considering EA's recent push towards relying on Origin for all of their digital distribution needs. Valve recently began adding free-to-play games to Steam, and it would make sense for EA to start fully-integrating their own F2P offerings into Origin to stay competitive, instead of throwing them onto other publishers' websites (they made their free software available through BigPoint's website a few months ago, too). Then again, they're allowed to be a little less strict when it comes to free-to-play games, because most of the in-game transactions happen from within the client, instead of through the portal.
