Online Pass

~ the obit ~

It was a slip of cardboard in the game case with a code printed on it. Buy the disc new and the code was already yours, so you barely registered it. Buy the disc used and the code had been spent by whoever owned it before you, and the multiplayer half of the game in your hand stayed locked until you gave Electronic Arts ten dollars for a game Electronic Arts had already been paid for once.

The industry circled this for a while before it had a name. Sony shipped something close to it with SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs: Fireteam Bravo 3 on the PSP, where a one-time voucher in the box opened multiplayer and a replacement cost twenty dollars, though Sony called that an anti-piracy measure rather than a used-game one. EA arrived from a different direction, through an initiative it named Project Ten Dollar in late 2009. Mass Effect 2 used a code to open its Cerberus Network. Dragon Age: Origins came with one that got you The Stone Prisoner for free.

The name itself landed on 10 May 2010, in a press release out of Redwood City announcing that Online Pass would launch the following month with Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 11 and then cover every EA Sports simulation title on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. New copies included the code. Additional ones cost ten dollars. There was a free seven-day trial, so you could find out what you were missing before paying to stop missing it. Peter Moore, who ran EA Sports then, called it an important inflection point in the business.

The strangest paragraph in that press release is the one about GameStop. An online pass existed to pull money out of the used-game trade, and GameStop was the used-game trade. Yet there is Dan DeMatteo, GameStop's chief executive, quoted inside EA's own announcement calling EA a forward-thinking publisher, because GameStop had agreed to stock the point cards its customers would need in order to undo what GameStop had just sold them. Both companies collected twice on the same disc. Only one of them took the blame for it.

None of this reached me, and the reason is structural rather than personal. The online pass was a weapon aimed at a retail used-disc market, at physical shops with a trade-in counter, and Turkey had no such market in any shape the scheme could damage. There is no GameStop in Ankara. Games came through the PC, and through the internet cafes where I spent a good part of 2002 to 2005, and in a cafe the machine belongs to somebody else and nobody is typing a code off a piece of cardboard. This was an argument between American publishers and an American retailer about an American aftermarket.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it locked ~

Multiplayer was the usual hostage, being the part of a game that costs the publisher money to run and the part players cannot pirate their way around. It spread past that fast. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning put an entire quest called House of Valor behind a pass. Rock Band 2 shipped twenty extra songs the same way. Once the mechanism existed the question quietly changed from what genuinely needs a server to what people will pay to unlock, and those are not the same question.

Critics could see where that ran. If a code can gate multiplayer this year it can gate a level next year, and eventually reselling a game becomes technically impossible rather than merely unrewarding. Publishers denied that was the destination. The destination turned out to be simpler and worse: games mostly stopped coming on discs at all.

~ the actual end ~

EA folded first, and did it more thoroughly than it needed to. On 16 May 2013 the company said it was discontinuing Online Pass because players had not responded to the format and EA had listened to the feedback. Then it went back through the catalog and stripped the requirement out of games that had already shipped with it, so the passes people had been made to buy stopped mattering. Sony settled the next generation a month later at E3 by banning online passes on the PlayStation 4 outright, having replaced them with a PlayStation Plus subscription that billed everybody for multiplayer instead.

Ubisoft went last. On 1 November 2013 it ended Uplay Passport and made the pass for Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag free, which mattered more than it sounds, because Black Flag's single-player campaign carried online features that were unreachable without one. The company line was that the system was no longer the best approach for making sure customers had the best possible experience with their games. Nobody said the actual sentence, which is that the used-disc market all of this had been built to fight was already dying without any assistance from them.

~ the next chapter ~

The online pass lost, and everything it wanted arrived anyway. Sony's answer was to charge every player a recurring fee for online multiplayer, which pulls far more money out of a household than ten dollars from an occasional second-hand buyer ever did, and people accepted it with almost no argument. Microsoft had been charging for Xbox Live for years already. Publishers stopped needing to punish resale once the platform holders had turned online play into rent.

The mechanism did not stay inside games either. Textbook publishers picked it up almost immediately, and they never let go: buy a used textbook and the access code for the homework system bound to it is already spent, which leaves the second-hand copy worth less than the paper. That is the online pass exactly, aimed at students instead of players. Unlike EA, nobody in that business has ever apologized for it or switched it off.

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