Patches are free. Battlefield Bad Company 2 has a similar feature, where you can resell the game but the person who buys it has to pay if he/she wants "VIP features". Yet patches are delivered all the time regardless whether you have paid the extra fee or not. You just won't get the for-pay stuff unlocked.

That's sort of the point I was trying to make earlier.

The people who buy commercial software (professionals, businesses, government) expect to pay for maintenance, including the right to receive patches. It's been that way forever.

Only consumers believe they are entitled to free patches. I hope it stays that way (patches are free). But I can also see that developers want to continue to make money after the initial sales, and that is the only way they have an incentive to maintain their games.

tell that to valve and their current flagship product TF2.


they might believe that it is the only way to make money but they are certainly wrong.

They make money off microtransactions in-game.

I have no problem with developers monetizing used games.

These "Online Passes" are some of the Greediest and stupidest shit I have ever seen this generation

I'll be waiting to see how this impacts sales of the games that use this. As has already been touched on, this kind of thing reduces the re-sale value of games, thus decreasing the overall value proposition for those who intended to recoup some of the cost by selling the game once they're finished with it. What remains to be seen is the extent to which people who sell their games recognize this, and the extent to which it changes their purchasing habits. I'm personally hoping this whole thing backfires on the game studios and the money lost from decreased first-hand sales is greater than the money they get from sales of these online passes, but only time will tell what the result is.

now
before hats?

this sucks, tbh you have to blame ea for this mess they started it :X

Stupid thing, it is very clearly in most EULAs stated that the game is provided as it is... yet people bitch when the dev doesn't release a patch.

do these passes give you a free online trial before you pay for them?
it would suck if you bought the game used long after release date, pay for the pass and there's nobody even online to play with

Well, this is a view that's basically been propagated by the developers and publishers themselves. We're constantly told that games are these huge, complex things and thus it's impossible to release them bug-free, but it's then implied that we shouldn't worry about this and should still buy the game right when it comes out because they'll patch out any bugs that are found. Honest. Of course, some of us recognize this as bullshit, and as a result we wait to ensure that a game is in a stable and playable state before buying it, and often this means waiting a month or six while it's patched up (during which time the price of the game drops, sometimes significantly). Now it's my impression that the gaming industry really doesn't want the facade of customers being promised and entitled to free patches being stripped away, as this would mean that more and more people would hold off on purchasing until they have confidence they're purchasing a usable product. So the industry should whine about people feeling "entitled" to patches at their own risk.

Professional software typically costs more than the computer it's running on. You can't compare that stuff with mass market consumer software.

Seeing the amount of people here defending this sort of thing just blows my mind.