EA Unifying Online Currencies for Play4Free Titles

Over at the Need for Speed World home page, there was a little news item I hadn’t seen any place else so far.

Electronic Arts is going to unify the currencies used for… most of their Play4Free titles.


Play4Free has six titles under its banner:

Of those titles, the following four are going to be merged into a single currency that will be shared across games using the same account.  Since EA has been on the great account merger hunt, which came as a bit of a shock when they merged my Star Wars: The Old Republic account into another account, all the EA games I play, plus Origin, EA’s new digital distribution platform, are now on a single login.

I am not sure I like that.  I certainly want an authenticator for my EA account, since getting into one gets you into them all, so I have to worry about their low rent web games paying as much attention to security as their triple-A MMO.  I am sure that seemed like a good idea to somebody.

Gimme that thing there!

Anyway, the following four currencies will be going away.

  • Lord of Ultima currency:  diamonds
  • Need for Speed World currency:  speedboost
  • Battlefield Heroes currency:  battlefunds
  • Battlefield Play4Free currency:  battlefunds

Those four will be replaced by a new currency which will be called… and this is really a sign of creativity at EA… Play4Free Funds.

Yeah, somebody in marketing got a bonus for that I’m sure.

As for the other two… well, Dragon Age Legends is on Facebook, so if it uses any currency, it is probably Facebook Credits.  And BattleForge… I don’t know why that isn’t on the list.  But I have never tried it, so no matter.

In a way, this might be a good thing for me.  I have some diamonds in Lord or Ultima, which I stopped playing since updates killed the game for me (I was going to write about that, wasn’t I?) which I might now prefer to use in Need for Speed World.

There is no word on the exchange rate… how much I will get in Play4Free Funds from my diamonds and speedboost… nor has there been any hint on what the new pricing schemes will look like both in and out of game.  But EA had better have that all lined up because this whole consolidation is supposed to go live on November 16, 2011.