EA is a company revered for their success in gaming as both publishers and developers. One of the veterans from the good ol' days, one has to pretty much tip their hat off to the conglomerate company for bringing memorable titles to our consoles. There was Mirror's Edge, Madden, The Sims, Skate or Die! (old school!), and Dead Space, just to name a few. When you have geniuses like Will Wright on your team, you're pretty much set with an abundance of creativity and profits.
Then there's the Online Pass. A system introduced that was spat on by most gamers; a system put in place to combat lost revenue from used game sales [gives GameStop a cold stare]; a system which has generated the company $10 - $15 million, as per CFO Eric Brown.
"The revenues we derive from that haven't been dramatic. I'd say they're in the $10 - $15 million range since we initiated the program," Brown says modestly. While this may seem like a crapton of money to middle-class folks like us, that's pretty much chump change for EA's pockets. First introduced last year for EA Sports titles, the Online Pass quickly expanded to a large portion of EA's games. And guess what? A handful of third-party publishers are utilizing the same code system for their games.
What would I call this Online Pass thing? As per those numbers EA has thrown out, and taking into account that this was just introduced: a huge success, my friends.