Speaking at the Deutsche Bank 2010 Technology Conference which was held in San Francisco yesterday evening (14 September) EA chief financial officer Eric Brown said that the controversial Online Pass system hasn’t irked consumers. Brown said, “The reception of the program has been positive.”
EA launched their Online Pass scheme earlier this year, having previously dubbed it ‘Project Ten Dollar.’ The Online Pass requires owners of first hand copies of certain games to register their single use multiplayer key with EA, and subsequently have that key locked to their console.
Anyone who purchases one of these games second hand will have to pay US$10 for access to the online multiplayer portion of the game. Brown estimated that 20 percent of all game sales can be attributed to the second hand market. The US$10 Online Pass supposedly justifies and diffuses the cost of providing a multiplayer service to people who didn’t pay EA directly for their copy of the game.
“We thought about [Online Pass] pretty carefully and there hasn’t been any significant push-back from the consumer, because I think people realise that if you’re buying a physical disc and it requires an attachment to someone else’s network and servers, [those] people realise bandwidth isn’t free,” explained Brown.
“So the fact that we’re diffusing or covering online costs is not viewed to be unreasonable. We’re well into this program and there is no consumer backlash,” concluded Brown.
Source: Eurogamer
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