But honestly, you are using their bandwidth while downloading, their servers for persistent online stats and messaging, and their matchmaking software (which, in my opinion is quite good, it's real easy to fire in and play, or play with friends without having to find a server and worry about team balancing).
I play UT3, CoD4... hell every game ive played on PC for FREE after inital purchace and had ZERO problems with finding servers that have features to my liking. Friends lists? Big fucking deal, I have AIM, MSN, ect.
Stuff is starting to cost money that
never cost money before because of the sole fact these people are greedy as hell and the consumers don't care or are to stupid to know otherwise (we are talking about console users here).