Further to EA dropping online passes going forward, they’ve reduced the asking price of a good chunk of existing ones to zero. In a strange, oddly unannounced move, the required passes for some online and some single player (ugh) are now free.
The list appears to be limited to Xbox 360 games at the moment, but if you’ve got any of the game below second hand and haven’t yet bought an online pass, at least now you can grab them for free.
- Alice: Madness Returns – American McGee’s Alice (was 800msp)
- Bad Company 2 VIP (was 800msp)
- Bulletstorm Online Pass (was 800msp)
- Dragon Age: Origins – The Stone Prisoner (was 1200msp)
- Dragon Age 2: The Black Emporium (was 800msp)
- Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Online Pass (was 800msp)
- Mass Effect 2: Cerberus Network (was 1200msp)
- Medal of Honor Online Pass (was 800msp)
- SHIFT 2 UNLEASHED™ ONLINE PASS (was 800msp)
- Skate 3: Skate Share Pack (was 800msp)
Quite why EA are doing this is anyone’s guess – perhaps the online sections of the above are closing up soon, or something like that. Regardless, perhaps you have two consoles, or some other reason – at least they’re now currently free.
Via GAF.
R1MJAW
The Skate 3 share pack is kinda pointless as they’re shutting down the Skate Reel and custom graphics portions of the online servers.
Despite rumours that have been bandied about on the internet lately, the actual game servers are remaining online (though this has nothing to do with the share pack).
tactical20
Oh, just saw this after my post below…
tactical20
Don’t the Skate 3 servers close tomorrow?!!!
Origami Killer
Although this is good news it seems a little pointless. These games are old and even buying new, with pass, they’re cheap as chips to pick up in store.
Forrest_01
Most of those are pretty ‘throwaway’, but American McGees Alice is worth playing through for the price of ‘free’ for those that got Alice Madness Returns & wondered how it all started.
blarty
Will be all existing games and passes will be reduced to zero price on both XBL and PSN
https://help.ea.com/article/online-pass-has-been-discontinued
xdarkmagician
John Reseburg from EA released a statement for this, part of which says
“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.”
I really, really hope that this is EA trying to change. Maybe its because they have something more sinister planned, but maybe its not.
As much as I previously despised EA and currently still dont trust them, its incredibly hard to find something negative about EA removing the passes. Theres an old saying that it takes something like 10 positive actions to make someone forget about one negative action, so its understandable for the mistrust not to stop, but until we hear otherwise I’m counting this as the first positive action along the road to forgiveness. Hopefully EA will have more positive news at E3 and maybe, just maybe I’ll be able to buy BF4 in good consciousness.