First, I am not an admin, and I have no affiliation with this (or any other) board game site. However, I'm getting tired of seeing comments like these through the years.
BGA is not "gouging for normal use." BGA does not own the licenses to all the board games in existence, and in fact I don't believe they own the licenses to any games. Some games are in the public domain, but the vast majority of games on BGA are here because of an agreement with the owner of the license. If BGA tried to have a game without an agreement, enforcement of international intellectual property laws would shut them down very quickly. Those agreements generally state something to the effect of "to prevent people from just playing on BGA for free instead of buying a copy of the game, there must be some restriction on playing from the same location." Many publishers see a benefit to exposing their game to many people: it will encourage people to buy their game to play when together. If they can play it together without buying a copy, then that benefit is removed.
You might also like to do some research into what some companies require. I heard one company's agreement was that for every digital copy of the game being played, the website had to purchase a physical copy. 28 simultaneous games? Yeah, you need 28 physical copies sitting in the warehouse.
Normal use is one person sitting at a single computer. For this BGA charges a whopping
nothing. No subscription fees, not even forcing the user to be distracted by advertisements. That's hardly a gouge.
