Last month, EA announced that they were doing away with the one policy virtually every gamer hated, the Online Pass. We collectively cheered, but then became skeptical as to why they would make such a sudden move. When we heard about the Xbox One's connectivity and sharing games requirements, many people began to think that this was the reason why—the next-gen consoles were going to have something similar to an Online Pass in place. After Sony declared at E3 that they were not changing their connectivity and used game policies for the PS4, of course the question went back to EA: are you going to bring back the Online Pass?
"It's dead, it's dead, it's deep-sixed, it's at the bottom of the Mariana Trench," Electronic Arts' President of EA Labels Frank Gibeau told Joystiq yesterday.
"We're not crafting a strategy to bring [Online Pass] back, you will not input codes to unlock your game, it's not going to happen," Gibeau emphasized further. He even went as far as to say that the program 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 said.
He did go on to say that EA would find ways to make money through other means, although he didn't specify exactly how.
Now if only EA will let go of the requirement to always be logged in to Origin while playing single-player games.
