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.<\/p>\n
This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, as it was strongly suggested by executive producer Patrich Bach earlier this year.<\/p>\n
While this may have some people up in arms, we recently discussed<\/a> how the 2nd hand game market can be more problematic than piracy, with developers essentially earning nothing from 2nd hand purchases.<\/p>\n 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?”<\/p>\n He responded, “You can also purchase an online pass for a used copy.”<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n Source: Eurogamer<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n