Those who are seriously in to multiplayer pay full price. If one waits until the price comes down, multiplayer usually goes in a few directions detracting from it's enjoyment. one, the vast majority of players may have moved on and it's a ghost town. two, everyone is high level and it's hard to find games with other players until you level up enough and leveling up without other players is a grind. Last, it's a skill based game and the majority of players are good and know the levels/races/whatever and you must suffer through many, many losses until your skills and knowledge gets up to speed.
Part of it is that I live in the United States (and not in Austin, TX or Kansas City) so I have to live with either high latency phone company DSL or expensive high latency phone company LTE. This means usually I get fragged as soon as I get in the room and there isn't much I can do with it.
My son, however, likes the multiplayer mode in Need For Speed.
