Ready for some shocking, jaw-dropping news? Well, you won’t find any here. As expected, EA will be sticking their lovely online pass into new copies of Battlefield 3. This of course means that if you buy the game pre-owned to save a few bucks, you will then have to dish out extra funds for the online pass seperately.
DICE’s Alan Kertz confirmed this with this statement:
“You can also purchase an online pass for a used copy.”, which was quickly followed up with “Because servers cost money, and used games don’t make developers any money” to give a bit of reasoning to the decision.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Battlefield: Bad Company 2 did quite well for EA, and Battlefield 3 will no doubt benefit from those huge numbers if we judge by the high number of pre-orders the game has already taken. If you were to factor in all of the gamers that bought the game at a discounted price with pre-owned sales, you would think that those users will end up buying Battlefield 3 new anyway. I know nearly everyone is adding online passes these days, but you would think that some developers would eventually understand that a high number of used sales can equal a high number of pre-orders for your next follow-up.
Maybe I am just blabbering on about the unchangeable and I am still in “the entire experience should be on the disc” mindset, but if more companies would reward gamers for purchasing new with extra content rather than taking away half the experience in this punishing process, their future sales for sequels would be even greater.
