True - the last customer in the supply chain always pays everyone's costs and margins or the product dies. What bonding-on-bid does though is force suppliers to get insurance before signing on contractual commitments thereby achieving two aims:

• A) levelling the playing field between those who pre-emptively had their backsides covered and those who don't
• B) filtering out all potential players for whom the market can not find a palatable cost at which to price their risk

Insurance is important in most trades.

Why should the rocket manufacturer pay the insurance
Wait what? In many industries bonding is a prerequisite for simply submitting a bid and being bondable a prerequisite for being employed. Hell try getting a mortgage without insurance. This is so dumb I had to login to comment for the first time in years.

I live in Canada. What's this Hulu of which you speak? The sooner flash dies the better.

A common method of license enforcement is a serial check upon logging onto the official server network. Hosting your own server would, of course, avoid that.

The problem as I see it though is that many online server networks do not make it easy or enjoyable or, in cases, even possible to setup games for the enjoyment of people who already know each other - particularly if they are in the same room. Explicitly working against local lan play makes many games a poor choice for those who would wish to use them in a social setting.