EA's senior director of corporate communications John Reseburg confirmed the discontinuation of online passes to VentureBeat.
EA's senior director of corporate communications John Reseburg confirmed the discontinuation of online passes to VentureBeat. “Yes, we’re discontinuing Online Pass. None of our new EA titles will include that feature. As an effort to package a full menu of online content and services, many players didn’t respond to the format. We’ve listened to the feedback and decided to do away with it moving forward.” Reseburg said.
Game Informer reached out to Electronic Art's VP of corporate communications, Jeff Brown to ask him why Electronic Arts reach this decision. "There's not much to say. The online pass came out in 2010" said Brown. "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."
EA was one of the first publishers to enable online passes, and since then other publishers have followed suit like Ubisoft and THQ. With EA shutting down the online pass program, hopefully they can return to developing solo single-player experiences without having to tack on a multiplayer component, but I am not holding my breath.
Source: Venture Beat
