Video game maker Electronic Arts Inc. has decided to cease its controversial Online Pass program for all of its future game title releases. Since 2010, the publisher has required buyers of many of their used games to pay additional fees to access online multiplayer content.
Under the Online Pass program, second-hand game buyers paid on average of $10 per game to receive a distinctive device-specific code for online features. Created to essentially function as a variation of a DRM (Digital Rights Management) tool to curb the growing used game market, EA generated a healthy $15 million from the program in 2010.
Despite the additional revenue, the program's use in many popular titles such as Madden NFL, Need for Speed, Dead Space 2, and Medal of Honor, was widely panned by many gamers. As EA spokesman John Reseberg acknowledged in an interview with VentureBeat, "many players didn't respond to the format and we've decided to do away with it moving forward."
In the wake of bad press following EA's fumbled launch of its latest SimCity title, in which server issues caused the always-on Internet-connected game to fail, many industry analysts believe this decision is partly to save face with its disgruntled core customer base.
While future EA titles such as FIFA 14 and Battlefield 4 will no longer require users to use the Online Pass program, its primary game publishing competitors, Activision Blizzard Inc. and Ubisoft Entertainment SA, still continue to use similar online restricting access codes. Additionally, the forthcoming iterations of both Sony's Playstation and Microsoft's Xbox consoles are widely speculated to utilize extra online access and used game restrictions.
Given the ever-growing scale of the lucrative second-hand video game market and ongoing concerns by game developers and publishers that gamers are favoring used over new, it is likely that the "pay for additional play" trend will continue, in spite of EA's decision reversal.
