Passing of the Future

More than ever games are taking great strides towards adding post-release content like new skins, songs, avatar awakes and missions to their ever expanding arsenal. This has now branched off into an attempt from developers to reduce the second-hand market by placing extras into their factory sealed versions of the games.

The main area I’m referring to is the ever expanding Online Pass system that grant those of us who picked up the game new a few additions to our games, whether that be content only available to those full price payers or but giving away free content codes or missions packs.

These Online Passes are still available to those second hand purchases but are usually priced to ensure that buying a game second hand and the pass exceeds the price of the standard factory sealed product. This means that people who rent the game or buy a used version, must pay more to extract their games full value.

It’s well known that publishers have always hated rentals and used sales, because they bring back little or no money to the companies that made them. It looks like they have now found a way to make everyone pay the full ticket price or at least improve their current return on investment.

OK so Online Passes are nothing revolutionary or new but the system itself is now spreading with Battlefield 2, Assassins Creed: Revelations, Mass Effect 3 and even Batman Arkham City all getting on board. This area of the market is going from being every few games to an almost mandatory inclusion. There are now only a few big guns out there thriving without the online-style extras like Gears of War 3 and Call of Duty (what a surprise).

Rental shops tend to hurdle this issue as many of their customers only use the short term trial once whereas second hand gaming stores suffer as the £10.00 cost for a pass often exceeds the £5.00 saved by purchasing second hand titles. This is a real problem for budget minded gamers especially in the current economic climate when people can’t afford £50.00 to buy every game new.

The online passes are not the only incentive being offered to buy new – Rockstar kicked this off with their Pass system that allowed a discount to future content. What this basically means is that anyone with the pass would be able to download the additional content for LA Noire at no extra cost (and usually means the pass owner gets the content at a discounted rate to what they would have paid individually). Mortal Kombat, Saints Row 3 and Gears of War have all now followed suite with similar systems too showing the industry wide popularity of reducing second hand sales.

Activision have gone one further with their Call of Duty Elite membership that bundles together DLC, statistics, tutorials and clans into one application. This is very similar to the Halo Waypoint service except that it’s £50.00 a year for membership and includes all DLC at no extra cost. Users actually benefit from a full £10.00 reduction over the total cost of each DLC individually and get access to a full tracking system too. These subscription plans are become part of the parcel these days and their use will only increase over the next 12 months.

A refreshing look at these options came in the form of XBLA exclusive Crimson Alliance last month when the product arrived as a free download. This hack-n-slash RPG comes with three classes that can be used for free within the demo version. Each class being taken into the full game though costs 800 Microsoft points but all three being purchased costs 1200 points which is more than the cost for one character but a discount if you want the option to play as any of the three. It’ll be interesting to see whether this model is successful and if so whether any developers would take this option forward with their other releases.

The Online Pass looks like it is becoming a staple part of the industry now but it is also easy to see that many developers have different ideas about what exactly entices users to buy into their schemes. The options are fairly broad for most developers out there so the next 12 months will really show which path they find most profitable and why. In truth these packages offer a type of transaction to guarantee a certain level of sales while additional elements for games encourage people to keep playing.