A few of you may know about EA’s online pass, which is now becoming contagious with companies like THQ jumping on board. For those that don’t a quick summary is that these companies believe that if you buy a game used you should pay to play online, but you get it free if you buy the game new. This is about an extra 15 bucks ontop of the used game, similar to Battle Field Bad Company 2’s VIP code except it locks you out of the game instead of giving you extra content.

While this may seem unfair to some, and in some ways it is, but for the companies it makes a lot of sense. Why should they let you play online for a hundred plus hours when they make no money except from you buying the game?

Well I think I may have a solution to this and a pet wish of mine at the same time. Imagine having a copy of Battlefield Bad Company 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops or your favourite other shooter on your hard drive as if it was a PSN/XBLA game that you could play at anytime online.

So when you got sick of the game you are currently playing in the disk drive, just quickly boot up Call of Duty straight to the multiplayer and search for a game. It would be quicker thanks to the game being stored on the Hard Drive and you don’t have to get off your lazy arse to swap disks. Sure a lot of this is probably attributed to my erratic game playing habits; I like to swap and change games a lot and tend to play downloadable games a lot because they are just there.

Now to my real point, imagine buying Call of Duty: Black Ops and having a code within the box enabling you to download the game from XBLA or PSN to live on your hard drive. If you then could take the disk out and sell it down the track once you have finished with the Single Player and the Co-op in the game. The next person needs to buy a code to play online, but that online code gives them the chance to download the game again. So instead of just paying to play online, you are paying to download the game to your hard drive.

This gives the best of both worlds, I think at least, because the publishers are still making extra money on the game via an online pass but they are also giving us gamers an extra convenience at what is a probably low risk, not to mention a larger user base to then sell DLC to.