If planning to wait on your Battlefield 3 purchase until you can pick up a 2nd hand copy, you’re going to have to pay extra if you want to play online.
This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, as it was strongly suggested by executive producer Patrich Bach earlier this year.
While this may have some people up in arms, we recently discussed how the 2nd hand game market can be more problematic than piracy, with developers essentially earning nothing from 2nd hand purchases.
The news comes from DICE designer Ian Kertz’ twitter feed, when asked “do you need to buy a new Battlefield 3 to play Xbox Live?”
He responded, “You can also purchase an online pass for a used copy.”
When inevitably asked to justify the implementation, Kertz was straight to the point, replying: “Because servers cost money, and used games don’t make developers any money.”
Patrick Bach’s comments from earlier explain further, “The whole idea is that we’re paying for servers and if you create a new account there is a big process on how that is being handled in the backend.”
“We would rather have you buy a new game than a used game because buying a used game is only a cost to us; we don’t get a single dime from a used game, but we still need to create server space and everything for you.”
“We want people to at least pay us something to create this because we’re paying for it. It was actually a loss for us to have new players. Hopefully people understand why. It’s not to punish people. To us it’s compensation.”
Source: Eurogamer
Battlefield 3 second hand purchases will require online pass << Comments and views
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