Q: How many players do you need to make pay for micro-transactions to cover the costs?

Ben Cousins: The way it works...We do quite a detailed business plan, we've got a team, a store manager, a marketing guy and a business development guy working full time on heroes now, working on the business model.

Our assumptions all are based around the fact that 95 per cent of people won't spend any money, and there's a small group of five per cent of people who are willing to spend money.

I can't go into the figures but you can look at the Korean games, which have their figures public - a lot of them - and you can build your model based around about how much people spend and how many people are spending money and things like that.

You do have to go broader than previous Battlefield games and you need maybe double the players that you had for BF2 for Battlefield Heroes to be a really big success.

Q: Previously you've said that none of the items available to buy will affect gameplay. Are you confident that cosmetic changes will be enough to encourage people to spend money on micro-transactions?

Ben Cousins: If you think about it from a gamers perspective, us as hardcore gamers or people in the industry, we always think about the mechanics - people will only buy something for a reason.

This isn't the case if you look at something like Habbo Hotel or Club Penguin or MapleStory. Some of the items that sell the best are items that don't really have any effect on gameplay what so ever.

Our store manager came to us from a German free-to-play game, and he has incredible stories of items that have no gameplay impact whatsoever, which are quite expensive, selling tens of thousands. You're talking roughly EUR 30 an item that people are quite happy to buy, which just changes the way their character looks. So there is a precedent out there, so we're quite confident of that.

Q: How does the download work? Is that a permanent presence on your computer? Because it seems like such a web-based game.

Ben Cousins: It is web-based, but it's too big and too high quality for us to run in a browser and just hold it in memory, so we do an install.

It's very simple, you register as you would for something like Facebook or a forum - a very simple registration process - login, press "play now" and it will download the game. 250MB, it's very quick, and that's basically it.

You can choose where you install it just like a normal PC game, but we think most people will just go for the standard place, and whenever you hit play again it will just launch the game.

So, you have to go to the website to launch the game, but it's a permanent installation on your computer.

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