I don't know. I'm personally not affected by it since I'm buying this one new but I do have my own problems with online passes.
My one gripe about this is that my fiancee wants to get into DOA5 and on top of paying for Xbox Live, now we also have to pay $10 to just give her the ability to keep her own stats online separately from mine. Some people have larger families than that and now they have to spend $10 each so they can all play the game on their own account? I can buy games where everyone gets to experience the full game for just $10 and that's money that goes directly back to the publisher/dev. I absolutely do not believe that $10/a code packed with new copies should allow you access to what is essentially a half or third of the game. The online MP is a HUGE selling point for a game, some people pay the $60 just for the MP component.
What if the online was the only part of the experience you were interested in, you can't even rent the game without paying an extra $10 to try the online and see how it works out in your home. Anyone with a start-up site writing reviews can't buy every game they play new and have to rely on renting.
It's a community thing too. I can't stress enough how I don't have money for any games. I've become extremely economical and there are a lot of times where I need to buy things used (never from Gamestop, mostly craigslist and eBay) but I won't do it for games with online passes. I usually have a budget of $25 dollars for games (That DOA5 is really putting me in the hole... T-T) and I can either, hypothetically, buy Mortal Kombat 9 for $15 plus the $10 for the online pass and that's it or I can buy King of Fighters XIII for $15 and Tekken 6 for $5-10, and if I catch some good deals, maybe I can stretch my budget an extra $5 to afford a game on sale on XBLA or PSN, something that usually happens when I feel like I'm getting the most mileage out of my money at the start. To this day, I've never bought a used game without the pass it needs. 2-3 full games will always beat 1 and that detracts from the amount of potential players for that scene and a future audience for the next product. And that is important in the grand scheme of things. More players and a larger audience is always a good thing and is always a benefit for the pub/dev.
I really just don't see it as fair and maybe that's because there are games that exist where I don't have to worry about an online pass to get access to the full game. Past, present, future, no matter the circumstance, the full game is my own no matter how I came into possession of it. Online passes aren't convenient or welcoming and there's no reason they need to be accepted. There are a lot of different experiments going on in terms of recouping costs from used purchases and I think companies should keep looking until they find one that's convenient, fair, and works as much in the consumer's favor as it does the company's. Since when does the consumer exist to serve their supplier? Kinda backwards to be honest.
At the end of the day though, it's an opinion. However, I feel like this thread is a bit skewed to the POV that one should either accept online passes or accept that they (the online pass opposition) are despicable for finding a more affordable way to obtain a product and are babies for speaking out against the method employed by these game companies that they do not find satisfactory.
I'm particularly loving the way TTT2 is implementing their "online pass" if it's concerning their WTF and not actual online gameplay. That should be applauded and supported.
