14 DAY TRIAL // Publisher THQ has announced that its upcoming first-person shooter Homefront will be including a new Online Pass system specifically designed to eliminate or limit second-hand buying which will eliminate most of the multiplayer functionality for all those who get the game second hand for a lower price.
Homefront will include an online persistent character for all gamers who can get up 75 experience levels, allowing access to more weapons and more abilities, and those who get the game rented, borrowed or used will only be able to experience 5 of them.
In order to get full functionality gamers who like what they see will need to pay 10 dollars.
Those who get the game new will never have to pay anything in order to enjoy the multiplayer experience and will presumably also get more content once the game is out.
THQ seems to be following (even when it comes to naming) in the footsteps of publisher Electronic Arts, who has introduced the Online Pass concept for all its sports-based titles last year, and has reported good subscription numbers from those who picked up the used game.
THQ first made a similar move in UFC Undisputed 2010, where the online component cost 5 dollars when the game was used.
One potential pitfall of the Online Pass concept is that the number of gamers who engage in multiplayer for Homefront never passes a critical threshold, which could lead to even more people putting their game up for sales second hand and to a further decline in multiplayer numbers, a death spiral for a first-person shooter that aims to replicate some of the online based success of Call of Duty.
Homefront is being developed by Kaos Studio and at the moment it has a launch date of March 8 in the United States, arriving on the PC, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.