8 Video Games You Didn't Realise Broke The Industry
6. SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs: Fireteam Bravo 3 - Introduced Online Passes
Sony
Online passes were a relatively brief phenomenon, but they were EVERYWHERE for a time during the seventh generation of consoles. Effectively designed to kill the second-hand market, these passes made it so that every sealed game would come with a code that would give the player access to online features. Without the code, they couldn't go on multiplayer, which meant they'd have to buy the pass for an additional fee through Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network.
Online passes faced an immediate backlash upon their introduction, but publishers persisted with their use until the seventh gen ended. Ubisoft and EA were the keenest adopters, with titles like Assassin's Creed and Dragon Age both featuring online passes across a number of different entries.
For all that Ubi and EA were the worst offenders when it came to online passes, they weren't the companies responsible for their initial introduction. In actual fact, it was Sony's exclusive SOCOM series that was the first game to have an online pass, with PSP exclusive Fireteam Bravo 3 requiring a $20 fee for players to get online had they acquired the game second-hand.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
