Recently all news regarding EA has been bad news. Lay-offs, cancelled games, acquiring the Star Wars license, it’s all be terribly sad as of late.
So it’s with much joy that we get to report that EA has decided to do-away with the controversial Online Pass system that has plagued just about every EA game over the last few years,
Speaking to GameInformer, Electronic Art’s VP of corporate communications, Jeff Brown gave an explanation for the corporations decision:
“There’s not much to say. The online pass came out in 2010. It was a way of packaging together a suite of post-launch content and services for people. There was also an element for people who bought the game second sale. It never really caught on. People didn’t like it. People told us that they didn’t like it and you know, we went through a cycle and we’re about to put out some new games and we just decided not to do that anymore. We’re 100 percent committed to creating on-going content and services so the consumers get more value out of the game – you know games like Battlefield and FIFA where there’s all sorts of new things that get added all the time – but the whole idea of packaging it up with an online pass, clearly it was not popular, so we listened to people and we stopped doing it.”
So there you have it, the Online Pass is no more… With EA at least. There are still plenty of publishers who are using the Online Pass system in one form of another, including Sony and all of their first party titles. The majority of publishers just followed the line when EA introduced the much-despised Online Pass, but will they follow once again in removing it? Probably not…
This is great news, but at the same time, it’s hard to not wonder what EA will introduce next. It’s hard to imagine that EA will just sit back and smile whilst players enjoy their games that they’ve bought at a lower price due to it being second-hand. Only time will tell…
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Source: Game Informer