Cousins leaves EA’s Easy Studio

Ben Cousins, the man behind EA’s successful forays into the free-to-play games market, has announced his departure from the publisher.

In a brief statement issued on Twitter last night Cousins stated: "Battlefield Play4Free launches this week and it’s time for me to leave EA. Very proud of what I’ve achieved in the last 4 years."

Cousins was also the mastermind behind free-to-play pioneer Battlefield Heroes, which to date boasts around 7m users.

The exec departs having recently made his mark in the industry via his fierce advocation of emerging games models and his dismissal of the traditional market.

I can’t think of anything more exploitative than gating all of your content behind having to pay someone $60," he stated just last week. "That’s a really harsh business model if you think about it objectively."

At the London Games Conference last November Cousins predicted that Battlefield Free2Play could be the turning point for the traditional market.

There’s an opportunity in the next two to five years to cause a significant disruption to the traditional triple-A console market," he asserted. "I want someone considering buying a game on a Microsoft console to think ‘but these games are free over here’.”