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EA is discontinuing the online pass, which required users to punch in a one-time-use code to activate the online offerings of its games.
"It never really caught on. People didn’t like it. People told us that they didn’t like it and, you know, we went through a cycle and we’re about to put out some new games and we just decided not to do that anymore,” EA’s VP of corporate communications Jeff Brown told Game Informer.
The online pass would lock away online features of EA games till users activated the pass online. Each new copy of a game would include the one-time-use pass, thus locking online features away for anyone who borrowed that copy or purchased it second-hand.
Those people who had the game but not the online pass were allowed to purchase it for a fee, which was usually around $10.
The system was first implemented by EA, but since then, several other publishers, including Sony and Ubisoft, have also implemented it.
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