EA Online Pass
While it wasn’t EA that came up with the online pass, they sure did run away with it to a frankly insane degree. What EA called “Project Ten Dollar” was a hugely transparent strong-arming of players who dared exercise their consumer right to purchase a product second hand, locking them out of key features of the game, usually online play, though it was possible to lock single player content away such as when the EA published Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning locked away a seven-part quest behind their code, proving the slippery slope that they were. EA eventually removed them from all of their games in 2013, around the same time there was serious consideration around the Xbox One doing that job for them, while also responding to pressure.
