By Lorin Baumgarten

As you may or may not know, when writing Gaming Matters each week, I generally use everyone’s favorite podcast, EpicBattleCry, as a springboard for musing on a given subject. Every once in while, however, I will stray from the show’s content to talk about a matter that I feel is more strongly in need of my attention. This is one of those weeks. That being said, this week’s episode of EpicBattleCry is as expertly crafted and comically poignant as ever, and you should listen to it as soon as you finish reading my column. So what is it, then, that has drawn my attention away from a show as endearing as our beloved EpicBattleCry? I’ll do you a favor and skip the hints and innuendos and just get right to it. It’s EA Sports’ ridiculous announcement that, for all of its future sports games, you will have to pay $10 to play online if you purchase the game used. Don’t believe it? Neither did I. Read on to delve into what has become the new acme of idiocy in the video game industry.

So if you didn’t see the original story about this travesty, here is a bit of background for you. EA announced this week that all of its sports games, from this point forward, would require an Online Pass to access online features within the game. This includes multiplayer, franchise modes, add-ons, and anything else EA can think of. Included in the list of games impacted by this announcement is Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11, NCAA Football 11, NHL 11, Madden NFL 11, FIFA 11, NBA 11, and EA Sports MMA. The Online Pass is a one-time use code that will be included for free in all new copies of the game, but will cost the player $10 should they purchase a used copy of the game.

There are a couple of other important details of note regarding the Online Pass and, in the spirit of fairness, they bear mentioning. First is that each Online Pass code will be attached to either your PSN ID or Xbox Live Account, giving you the ability to take the game to a friend’s house and access all of your online features, assuming that you log-on using your own ID/Gamertag. The second is that each unique Xbox Live Account or PSN ID will be allowed one 7-day free trial period to check out the online features for each title, therefore providing a means for those who rent the game to access the online content, albeit only one time, and only for seven days.

To these tiny concessions I say, “who cares?” The over-arching idea is so farcical that what small solace (and by small – I mean none) I may take in knowing that I can bring the game to my friends house, is meaningless. And the ability to use the online features when you rent the game, but only once and only for seven days (there goes the whole point of GameFly), is as poorly thought out as the rest of this debacle.

So why is EA doing this? According to Peter Moore, head of EA Sports, “This is an important inflection point in our business because it allows us to accelerate our commitment to enhance premium online services to the entire robust EA SPORTS online community”. What enhancements? I haven’t seen any enhancements associated with this price increase announced by EA. Or is this the “Pay us first and then we’ll be able to do cool stuff later” model? Tell ya what, Peter, why don’t you go ahead and accelerate your commitment and enhance the premium online content with the billions of dollars you have already made off of these franchises, and then, when we actually see significant improvements to the products, we can talk extra money? Oh, and let me be clear, when I say significant improvements, I’m not talking about the small year over year iterations we typically see in sports games. You know, the ones that still garner you a full $60 price tag each year. I’m talking about real changes, ones that EA can prove to consumers necessitate additional funds to support their creation and maintenance. Then, maybe, we can talk alternative pricing structures. Sound fair?

But back to my original question, why is EA doing this? Is EA losing money on these franchises? Or do they just want more? There is an argument that seems to be emerging from industry analysts, which you can see in this post on IndustryGamers.com, that I would like to address. I am going to pick on a quote from Michael Pachter, famed Wedbush Securities analyst and GameTrailers regular, because it seems to summarize one of the prevailing arguments for the legitimacy of this pricing plan. Here is his quote:

The concept is simple: as gamers migrate to heavier online play as a part of the experience, the publisher needs to be compensated.

If the gamer is the original purchaser, the publisher gets paid when the user buys the game; if the gamer is a second-hand purchaser, the publisher currently does not get paid. With Online Pass, EA is ensuring that second-hand purchasers will pay something for the maintenance of the server network and for access to premium content, since they extend the costs of providing these services.

Now I am a fan of Mr. Pachter’s, and I don’t disagree with the initial part of his statement that publishers should be compensated for online play. But, curiously, I thought that occurred when the game was purchased for $60 at the store. But let’s move on to the second part of his statement. In it, Mr. Pachter asserts that the publishers get paid when the initial purchaser buys the game (true enough), but not when the second owner does (also true) and that this is not fair to the publisher because the second owner is not helping to pay for the maintenance of the servers which they are using (not true). When the second owner purchases the product from the first owner, they are reimbursing the primary owner for the money that the primary owner has already paid the publisher (by making the initial purchase), a portion of which is dedicated to supporting the online services . By selling the product, the primary owner has stated that they do not wish to use the product for the entirety of its useful life, but that they wish to transfer ownership, and all rights associated with it, to another party in exchange for financial compensation. The financial compensation is a means for the primary owner to recoup losses for not using the product for the duration of its useful life. So, yes, the second owner did pay for the use and maintenance of the online services by way of reimbursing the primary owner for the monies that they had put out for this very endeavor.

Here is a bit more down-to-earth way to phrase my rebuttal to Mr. Pachter’s assertion: Why does the publisher (EA) care who exactly is playing the game? How is it any different if I buy the game and play it for one year, or if I buy the game and play it for six months, then sell it to my friend who plays it for six months? Either way there is only one person playing the game, and therefore using one person’s worth of bandwidth, for twelve months. Having two different people play online consecutively is no more taxing on the system than having one person play continuously for the same duration. And don’t tell me that it is the storage required for two separate profiles. Although I am no technical expert, I would imagine that each profile takes just a few hundred KB to a few MB of space to store, and I would be happy to toss a Terabyte drive EA’s way if they need it (do the math – at 5 MB per profile you could store 200,000 profiles on one 1 TB drive at a retail cost of $109.99). So what exactly is it that costs EA more money to have two different players play a game for a total of twelve months of play time vs. one player doing so for the same amount of time? Asking users to pay a fee after purchasing the game used essentially sees EA get paid twice for something that is only being used once!

Allow me to give you an analogy: Imagine you decided to sell your car a few months after you bought it. Under the EA pricing plan, when the party who has purchased your car heads down to the DMV to appropriately transfer the title, they will find a clerk informing them that, without paying $2,499.99, they will not be able to use the radio, the clock, the air conditioning, the heat, the automatic locks, the alarm system, or the electric windows. Now, the car still runs – and all of the listed features are still there – they just won’t be able to use them because it costs the dealer money, under the 5-year warranty, to maintain these items. “But Lorin, you crazy bastard, where did you come up with a ridiculous figure like $2,499.99?” Well, that figure represents 16.66% of the cost of the car when it was brand new (assuming a $15,000 new-car cost), the same exact percentage that $10 represents relative to a $60 game. Oh yeah, and don’t think that the fee amount depreciates over time or as more people use the product, like the sale price will. Nope. It will always be 16.66% of the original purchase price of the product. Now I will admit that this isn’t a perfect analogy. Mostly because, in this scenario, the car retains nearly 80- 90% of its original functionality without paying the extra fee, while the game retains less than 50% of its original functionality. But you get the point.

When EA tried this “code with new purchase” thing with Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 it was, ostensibly, extra content that was at stake. An extra mission or two, some armor – nothing that was central to the game’s experience. When they did it with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 the line became a bit more fuzzy. Though the content gained by new purchasers of BFBC2 was couched as “Bonus Content” or DLC, and I suppose it technically was, really it was multiplayer maps/modes that were released/unlocked very shortly after the launch of the game and felt suspiciously like they were merely held back in order to exert control. But unlike the previous two games, without the “Bonus Content” in BFBC2 you would have a terrible time trying to play this game with your friends. So whereas with Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2, where the used game buyer only cared about not having the “new game” code if they wanted more than the original game, with BFBC2 we saw the game’s core gameplay effected by the absence of a code. Now, with the EA Sports plan, EA has actually completely excised a fundamental part of the game, effectively eviscerating the experience of playing the game.

Truly, there is no precedent for this with any other consumer product on the market today (please correct me if I am wrong). Once you buy a product, it is yours to do with as you please. The pathetic charade of using this money to focus on future enhancements or the idea that game companies are entitled to this payment, despite having already been paid for their services, is laughable. That is what the initial purchase price is for, period. Developers and publishers are not losing money on these franchises, I assure you. Quite the contrary, they are making hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars. And, until now, that was enough. But now they have convinced themselves that they deserve more.

And readers, I promise you – I absolutely promise you – that if consumers fail to send a clear message to publishers that this type of blatantly money-hungry behavior is not tolerable, or in their terms – that the market won’t support it – this will happen across every genre in gaming and, potentially, into other consumer product as well.

So, how do you send such a message? I think you know what I am about to say. There is only one real way to send that message – with your wallets. You need only to look to the various comments on the original EBA post of this story or the 70+ pages and 700+ comments on GameTrailers to see that there are many others who feel this way. So do something about it. Speak out here, or on the “http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/forums/show/3607.page EA’s forums, or Twitter, or anywhere else you want. But speak out! And most importantly, speak out with your wallet! It is the only language corporate America will listen to. You may think I am being hyperbolic, but this has some very long-term implications and how it plays out is entirely in your hands!

Editor’s Note: Lorin Baumgarten is the founder/owner of Furious Gamer Radio and although he makes a good argument pertaining to his disdain for the new EA Sports pricing model, we’re pretty sure the slander is due to the fact that he was unable to convince the NHL dev team to make his beloved Colorado Avalanche “untouchable” in NHL 11.