Bethesda Made Brink Free-to-Play Because “Why Not?”

"Why don't we just make it free?"

By Tom Marks

Earlier this week the 2011 competitive FPS Brink unexpectedly became free-to-play, announced only through a brief news post on Steam.

At QuakeCon this weekend, I spoke with Bethesda’s VP of Marketing and PR Pete Hines and asked him what fueled the abrupt decision. It turns out the reason is pretty simple: “Why not?”

“Todd Vaughn our VP of Development and I had talked about it and sort of kicked around this idea,” Hines told me. “Last year I think we had reduced it to like 99 cents [during a sale], and we were like ‘why don’t we just make it free? Like, why not?’”

“Just make it free and let people download it, and maybe they’ll buy the DLC and maybe they won’t, but let’s just try it.” Hines continued by saying “The game has been out for forever, how much money are we really making off a 99 cents [sale]?”

Hines said they decided to “just put it out free and see if people like it and people play it.” Since becoming free-to-play, Brink has seen a significant (if still modest) surge in its player base, hitting a peak of 2,600 concurrent players the day after the change was made.

Brink wasn’t very well received at launch (you can watch our review above, or read it here), but Hines thinks it was left it in a better state than people remember. “It had its issues back when it first launched,” Hines explained, “but I think we updated it and got it to the point where it was fun and stable.”

Hines concluded by saying “I like trying stuff, I like catching people off guard… It’s QuakeCon, we do fun stuff around QuakeCon.”

Tom Marks is an Associate Editor focusing on PC gaming at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

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