EA introduced the Online Pass to dissuade or at least make something from 2nd-hand game sales. Keep ”fans engaged” and they’ll stay.
“I want to take that in the other direction and bring consumers really great reasons to keep their games, rather than trade them in,” said Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia, commenting on the one-time download codes for second hand online games.
“Multiplayer is critical to the success of this series. It has such tremendous staying power – there are millions of people playing Call of Duty every day. It’s entertaining people on a magnitude that’s mind-blowing and we work really hard to make sure it’s supported for a long time.” World at War continues to receive support from Treyarch.
“The effort that goes into the multiplayer is a living thing – we have a team that continues to work on it for World At War. We’ve done that for a long time and expect to do so for this game.”
“We’re going to support the hell out of Black Ops. That will be our focus post-release: making sure we keep our fans engaged, and hopefully as a result, they’ll want to keep playing our game and won’t want to trade it in,” continued Lamia.
The studio promises that whether first or second hand, Black Ops will have fully accessibly multiplayer without the need to pay for a one-off activation code.
“You won’t see that for Black Ops,” he said. “The multiplayer comes with the game you buy – you don’t have to do anything else for that.” Both EA and THQ are using these access codes for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 and UFC Undisputed 2010 respectively.
