Okay, well, I looked up another webpage describing the cost of running your own dedicated servers for CS 1.6. They described the specs you’d need for your machine, and said it would be about $100-120 a month.
Were you trying to host a community for hundreds of people, or what?
Well, that was my point. It’s costly for Blizzard or anyone else to run a high-quality Vanilla server, and such an endeavor would be a pretty big waste of resources if they didn’t charge players to use it. See Nostalrius, who struggled to keep afloat because they relied on donations and nothing more to pay the bills.
Valve and Blizzard are two companies with very different business practices. Valve is content to passively make money off of Steam. Blizzard has to actually be worried about pirate servers stealing their income.