Electronic Arts says the Online Pass will stay dead and buried despite Microsoft’s decision to ease restrictions on trading and selling games on the Xbox One.
Electronic Arts pulled the plug on the Online Pass at the end of May, finally bringing to an end its unpopular practice of charging extra for access to things like online play in preowned games. Many believed its road to Damascus was paved by limitations on preowned sales expected to be built into the coming generation of consoles, but Sony confirmed at E3 that it would not impose those limitations and yesterday, in a very surprising move, Microsoft announced that it would step back from its plans to do so on the Xbox One.
But EA is sticking to its story that the end of the Online Pass was brought about by “player feedback,” and more importantly confirmed yesterday that it’s staying dead and buried. “[There is] no change to our decision to discontinue Online Pass,” John Reseburg, EA’s senior director of corporate communications, told Polygon.
“As we said a few weeks ago, none of our new EA titles will include online pass, and we are removing it from existing games as well,” he said. “Nothing else on today’s news, but did want to be clear that our online pass decision was based on player feedback, and there’s no change.”
Earlier this month, EA Chief Operating Officer Peter Moore said the publisher “did not aggressively lobby for the platform holders to put some gating function in [next-gen consoles] to allow or disallow used games,” and added that he is a “proponent of used games.”
Source: Polygon
