According to EA’s senior director of corporate communications John Reseburg, “(There is) no change to our decision to discontinue Online Pass. It is dead.”
He explained, “As we said a few weeks ago, none of our new EA titles will include online pass, and we are removing it from existing games as well. Nothing else on today’s news, but did want to be clear that our online pass decision was based on player feedback, and there’s no change.”
This may be because of the rumor that publishers will now be taking a cut of used game sales from retailers, though that may have been scotched thanks to Microsoft’s about-face.
