Used game owners have a ”legitimate right” to the title for ”doing anything illegal,” stressed Gibeau, and so they ”deep-sixed” the system. Online Pass was ”flat out dumb.”
All the pain it caused customers of EA’s games just wasn’t worth what they got from having to enter those codes before getting to enjoy all the game legitimately bought.
”It’s dead, it’s dead, it’s deep-sixed, it’s at the bottom of the Mariana Trench,” EA’s Frank Gibeau told Joystiq.
”We’re not crafting a strategy to bring it back, you will not input codes to unlock your game, it’s not going to happen,” he said, adding that Microsoft’s used game plans for Xbox One didn’t factoring into their decision of ditching Online Pass - and so PS4’s lack of DRM methods wasn’t going to entice them to rethink. It was ”flat out dumb.”
”The amount of money that we made, it didn’t replace the amount of frustration we put on our customers and it didn’t offset the reputation damage it caused the company. So we said ‘it’s not worth it,’ and so the idea was, look, ‘don’t do stuff like that anymore,’” he continued. A new CEO means they can ‘wipe the slate clean’ of previous misdeeds.
Online Pass was the result of something called ‘Project Ten Dollar’ which was to charge buyers of used games to cover the cost of online services provided to those titles, such as multiplayer servers. EA plans to monetise in other ways.
”Do used game buyers of FIFA participate in Ultimate Team? Yeah. Is it possible they might buy DLC? Yeah. Frankly, we’re being more nuanced and sophisticated about it. Before we used a blunt instrument. Now we’re going to be like ‘Look, they own it, they bought the disc and it’s theirs. They have a legitimate right for not doing anything illegal.’”
”If we want to be progressive about it, we will make online services available to them that if they want to buy they can, but they don’t have to. At least that way we participate in some monetization. The reputational damage it was causing us was in excess of the dollars we were making,” concluded Gibeau.
”At the end of the day, we’re not going to replace it. It’s not coming back. It’s dead.” Pigs can fly, it turns out.
