One thing I never got with Online Pass; User A buys a game but later he doesn't want the game anymore, sells or trades it in at a games store. User B buys User A's game and continues where User A left off. There is no change in the amount of people playing the game. So no extra server costs as it's the same amount of people. nly made it worse if you consider you'd never be able to even just lend your game to a friend (see Mass Effect 3, a single player game with idiotic online features).

Only problem I guess comes from illegal copies of the game and people playing the online portion while stealing the game. Although I can't see how to fix that issue, if they could they would have already.

Of course when it came to Xbox it made even less sense as you were paying M$ and EA as well to play online if you bought a game 2nd hand (plus ISP as well).