Watch out people, your multi-player experiences are going premium as various publishers and develops ruminate over pay-to-play; Activision are considering online fees for their Call of Duty franchise (despite poopoo'ing the idea to make it seem like they've not been thinking about it for quite some time). Now THQ are voicing concerns over the pre-owned market, saying that premium (paid for) multi-player is a 'robust' weapon against the 'threat' of the second hand games market. There's also a shift towards what everyone was originally concerned about when Valve introduced their Steam Network distribution system, that you could only play games 'online'. Publishers appear to be eyeing 'online only' gaming as a way to combat the pre-owned/second-hand markets and pirated games.
It's understandable that publishers would want to deflate the value of pre-owned games - based on the rhetoric on this issues you could be forgiven for thinking that right now it appears that pre-owned are horrendously over-priced, some 'new' pre-owned games being just a few bob short of retail prices in some places; gamers are loosing out as they're charged over the odds for 'used' material; publishers loose out because they don't see any of the revenue from used games sales. The flip side is that retailers loose out on boxed products because of low profit margins, as little as £/$0.50pence/cent per unit, so their argument is that it's simply not a workable, especially when big retail chain stores (Wall Mart, Tescos, etc) use their high volume orders as bargaining power to undercut the marketplace as a whole.
Everyone wants their piece of the pie.
You can already see this happening with APB, although a bit more MMO'ish than a traditional shooter multi-player they are suffering from people just hating the multi-player game in the trail version and getting very poor subscriptions...Yes exactly. How would that work, how would they justify horrendous MP gaming in those instances; Quake 4 for example had to undergo several point releases and it still died; Wolfenstein.. well the less said about MP the better, and I didn't even get the game for MP either!