10:30 am
EA, you bastards! Look what you’ve done! at some point this generation, EA decided they weren’t making enough money from the sale of games, especially the sale of used games – where they make not a damned thing. They implemented “Project 10 Dollar,” an incentive of sorts to get people to purchase their games new instead of 2nd hand. New games would be sold with an “online pass” – a single use token, enabling basic features like online multiplayer.
2nd hand games would more often than not have this code missing – so purchasers of used games would have to pony up money for the privilege. Rival publisher THQ soon followed suit..and now it looks like Sony may do the same.
“On the principle of making online portions of the game available or unlocked from the disc-based release for a fee, we’re broadly supportive of that,” said SCEE president Andrew House to Gamesindustry.biz .”And we’re exploring actively the same option for our own content.
That’s not to say that they’ll be charging for online multiplayer, per se.
“In terms of just a charge for basic online play, that’s something that we have to talk about a lot more and we struggle with a little bit because we feel very vindicated and base a lot of the success of PSN today – a 70 per cent connection rate across consoles – on the fact that we’ve removed that major initial barrier to entry.”
I understand that publishers want to make the most money they can from the games they invest so heavily in, and that used game sales rob them of income – but I’d really prefer their incentives included new features and content, instead of just enabling basic features we’ve all become accustomed to.
Source : GI.Biz
