Uncharted 3 game director Justin Richmond stated in an interview with The Sixth Axis that since the developer has invested a great deal of time and resources into the game’s multiplayer, they deserve to be be financially rewarded by customers who buy it used.
”We give literally thousands of hours of content in our online stuff and on top of that we give you not just competitive, but an entire co-op experience as well. There’s basically a whole alternate history, alternate version story in our co-op, and in this game they’re actually all tied together,” Richmond argued. ”Part of the reason for the online pass is that when that stuff goes online, it isn’t free. We have to pay for servers and all this different stuff to maintain it, and so at some point, you know, games have to make money.
“It is a business, and we just wanna be able to continue to provide that kind of content. If Sony ever comes to us and says ‘You’re not making enough money on this, you need to cut it’ or whatever, that’s not something that we want. We want to be able to maintain the level of quality of the product that we’re giving out.”
Richmond insisted that the multiplayer adds enough value to justify charging people who buy the game used. ”The other thing is that even if you do buy it used, it’s worth the price of that online pass just to get all that content, because there’s so much stuff. It’s either that or we offer online completely in its entirety also, so we have a complete offline package as well, so if you want to play the co-op with a friend, you can do that offline.”
Battlefield 3’s Alan Kertz said a few days ago on Twitter about Battlefield 3’s online pass, ”Servers cost money, and used games don’t make developers any money.”
Let us know what you think.
