Unfortunately, I think this sort of thing is going to become common for MMOGs - the "pay to stress-test" part, at least.
Open betas are just painful for MMOGs from the cash burn standpoint, especially when you're talking about supporting 10,000 people online for that beta. For them to be useful, they gotta be at least a month or so long - enough time to really see it under load. Just downloading the initial beta is going to be a huge bandwidth drain, let alone supporting them online in game for any length of time. I think the box fee is going to be seen more and more by developers as the cost of that first month or two shakeout before subscription begins.
The word on the street is that Anarchy Online is headed for the same sort of release.
