It seems that the marketing tie-ins for the Mass Effect franchise got a bit tangled over the holiday season. Bioware has released a statement to let customers who bought Mass Effect: Paragon Lost know that the company is aware of a problem with some of the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer unlock codes that came along with the movie:

It has come to our attention that some customers are receiving error messages when trying to redeem codes found inside specially marked copies of Mass Effect: Paragon Lost. The code, which entitles the customer to a bonus multiplayer reinforcement pack, contains an expiration date of 12/31/12. We want to assure the customers affected by this that we are aware of the error and are working to extend the expiration date so that the codes can still be redeemed.

BioWare went on to say that it will post an update to its blog when the issue is resolved.

Mass Effect: Paragon Lost is an anime movie set in the Mass Effect universe. It was developed as a collaboration between BioWare and Production I.G., the Japanese anime studio famous for projects such as Patlabor, The End of Evangelion, and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

The movie was only released on December 28, 2012, so an expiration date of December 31 is quite ridiculous. It’s likely that someone fat-fingered the date for some of the codes in a database somewhere. However, events such as this demonstrate quite clearly why it is silly for offer codes to expire before the product itself does.