EA Online Passes Go Free
EA have recently gone on record and said that it was going to do away with its online pass system for future games. What we didn’t perhaps know is that it was actually going to make content available for free. The following titles have had their online pass function removed completely, or is now available to download for free.
- Alice: Madness Returns
- Battlefield 3
- Battlefield: Bad Company 2
- Bulletstorm
- Dead Space 2
- Dead Space 3
- Dragon Age 2
- Dragon Age: Origins
- Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
- Mass Effect 2
- Mass Effect 3
- Medal of Honor
- Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit
- Need For Speed: The Run
- Need For Speed: Shift 2
- Skate 3
- The Sims
A pretty large list of titles – and a few of their more popular titles (Mass Effect for example) will no doubt be effect quite a few gamers.
EA have also issued a quote on the subject, which somewhat clarifies their stance on the whole matter:
“As we discontinue Online Pass for our new EA titles, we are also in the process of eliminating it from all our existing EA titles as well. We heard the feedback from players and decided to do away with Online Pass altogether.
Players will see it first with some EA Sports titles, where a prompt to enter an Online Pass code will no longer appear in-game; with other titles we are simply making Online Passes available free of charge online.
These are rolling updates that are taking effect over the next several weeks. We hope players continue to enjoy our games and online services for a long time to come.”
This change will take place on both XBox live Marketplace and the Playstation Network store. Fantastic news for those who’ve put off coughing up the money for the online pass, but I imagine if you’ve recently just shelled out the money for a pass, you’d be somewhat less happy.
Still, I am happy overall with this decision with EA. EA have gotten themselves a bad reputation with gamers around the world, and no doubt are doing what they can to address this situation. It’ll be interesting if they intend to continue their plans with micro transactions – which to say the least received a mix reaction when they were introduced to Dead Space 3.
