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You pay to play as long as you want, not for as long as you want and the indeterminate number of owners after you want. There's precedent for this in any other pass you buy -- you can't sell an all-day parking ticket to someone else when you're done with it, or let someone into a theme park on your ticket when you've ridden all the rides. That would be abusing a system designed to charge everyone equally for the right to use a service without worrying about time constraints. It would be unfair on other paying customers and would lead to higher ticket prices if left unchecked.
No, there aren't two people accessing a game when there were previously one -- there is one person accessing the game when there were previously zero.
Valve can afford to support their games for a long time because there's no such thing as second-hand games for them. They lock the entire game behind a pass. How is that better than an online pass that leaves the offline segment unlocked?
Like I said in the article, I do support developers that support games after launch -- that's what multiplayer is. And I don't see how a used copy of the Witcher or the Orange Box is less worthwhile than an unused copy if the developer doesn't restrict the benefits of its continued work to its customers.
It's easier to see the benefit of an online pass when it leads to something tangibly new, but that doesn't make the maintenance of launch content worthless.
And online passes don't hinder your gameplay or make content inaccessible to you -- they just charge you a fair price for it."
Game makers expect gamers to play for a finite amount of time, so they charge a fixed amount. They might pick it up again later, but that's not the same as coming to it without having played it before and tired of it because it's not going to take as long to tire of it again.
The problem of rented games should really be sorted out with rental services -- publishers sell rental copies of games to those services, so they could give them a supply of pass codes if Gamefly, LoveFilm, etc. paid for them. And there's nothing stopping you from lending your Xbox Live account to people you trust."
If developers intended a multiplayer game to be infinitely playable, they'd charge a subscription fee, support it with ads, or go for a freemium model."
(I don't have an iDevice for Furmins, by the way. Thanks for offering.)"
Edit: the fact that book and film publishers can't discourage used sales doesn't make it right there, either."
I don't understand why Battlefield campaigns don't capitalise on the things that make multiplayer great: randomness, freedom of play style, and multiple paths through levels. That's what I come to Battlefield for. (And what I like about Halo's campaigns, now that I think about it.)"
