EA Online Pass

General

If you have bought a game from Electronic Arts Recently, then you know what the picture above is all about. However if you have not, then I will explain. Basically the "Online Pass" is well, an online pass. You need this online pass to play online. Say for example you wanted to bring Fifa 11 over to a friend’s house, and you wanted to play a match against an online opponent, well you can't. The only way to do so would be to sign into the account which has the online pass activated. If you don't have the online pass, you cannot play online, you would be forced to buy it for about 8-10 USD.

The Facts

From a business stand point this is a very smart thing to do, the company makes money even if the game is not bought. This allows EA to get about 8 USD from each person that wants to play the game online. Although it may not seem like much for one user to pay, on a grand scale, with the millions of people who purchase EA games, the dollar amounts start to pile up. The first implementation of this that I noticed was in Medal of Honor for the Xbox 360. I do not know if EA installed this pass before hand, but that is when I noticed it.

So What's the Issue?

The issue is that you should not have to pay extra money to be able to play online with people. There is no clear reason why EA started doing this, besides for extra money. They have not set up dedicated servers for these games, there for there should not be any extra charge. Every other game that has online capabilities has not had charges put on them. For example, Call of Duty, the most successful first person shooter to date does not have a fee or pass in order for players to have online access. As a gamer who uses the Xbox 360 primarily, this extra charge is just another thing to add. If EA had dedicated servers for these games, the charge would be justified. Just because they include one in the box of the game, doesn't make up for the fact that if you want to play the game online, on another account that is not the account that the pass was registered to, you have to pay a fee.

Call of Duty "Elite"

General Info

So it's the thing that everybody in the gaming realm has been talking about lately. Call of Duty "Elite", in Layman's terms this is a payed subscription that is between 5 to 10 USD, Activision clearly stated it "will be cheaper than 'Netflix'", and for me that is not a huge deal.

What Do You Get?

You may be asking, "What do you get for this subscription?". Well so far the details have yet to be revealed, but there are some things that have been hinted at. For example, the subscription will give you access to map packs, now I'm not sure if you can still purchase the map packs by themselves or not, but for me this is not a big feature of "Elite". The other thing that has been rumored is that there will be a Youtubeish website that is dedicated to Call of Duty videos, where you can take your captures from the game, and post them online. Also in combination with this there will be an exclusive blog where gamers can chat about what guns work with what attachments, and things like that. Further more, there will be a "Stat Central" sort of thing that is very similar to the Bungie website where you could view your stats and accomplishments within Halo.

The Bottom Line

So, do I think it is worth the cost? There is to little information to call it just yet. Since Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 is not set to release until November, like all Call of Duty games, the date is to far off to tell. I am sure that down the road Activision will release more details, and more features that will entice gamers to sign up for this subscription based service. My one quandary that I have is that the replicated Youtube will not be a huge success. I feel this way because there is already a huge user base on Youtube, so why would people move to an alternate website, when they could just stay on one website and get all sorts of content.