It's easy to "win" an argument if you just label all information that would make you wrong as "irrelevant", isn't it?

It’s perfectly valid to talk about overall profitability when accounting for non-marginal costs, but that’s not the phrase you use to talk about it, and saying that some units are sold at a loss while others are not is nonsensical in that context.

Yes, and that is the error. The number of copies is not static, and might as well be considered infinite. With digital goods there is effectively no limit on the number of copies which can be produced at near-zero marginal cost, so cost per copy is a meaningless metric. Unlike physical goods where you need to recoup your variable costs for materials, labor, and capital on each item sold before you can even think about offsetting the fixed cost of R&D, every sale of a digital good contributes to the bottom line regardless of the price.

The single most expensive game to develop to date was apparently Star Wars: The Old Republic at $200 million[1]. If each of the 7.7 billion people on the planet had a copy, however, the development cost per copy would only be about $0.026, affordable even for the most limited budgets. Say that 5% of the population would be interested in trying it out at a price of just $0.25 per copy: that's $481M in revenues, or $281M profit. Or they could choose to make it a monthly subscription service at prices attractive to just 1-2 million players and lose money overall while charging subscribers $100 apiece. Same development cost, different distribution models. There is no predetermined cost per copy below which they are selling at a loss and above which they are selling for a profit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...

This isn't pedantry, this is discussing the actual topic of the conversation.

If the answer to your question was "no way" then software would be the one guaranteed way to swim in money.

I'm pretty sure I costed Microsoft money when I was younger and poorer, because I knew how to download most security updates for my pirated Windows without getting caught, so I costed then bandwidth and payed nothing.

Maybe they let that happen or did not work as hard as they could have to prevent it because they figured they'd recover their investment when I grew up and became a paying customer.

The marginal cost on infrastructure is like the marginal cost on bandwidth: really small.

Ah, you could have just said it's a matter of wording. Yes, what I meant is you could sell, and make a loss. So in order to drive up sales hoping that it will actually start a positive feedback loop where the growing community attracts more buyers, you could sell your software at different prices. You probably noticed even some cloud services sell for different prices depending on country (MS gives you some cloud things 20% more expensive in Germany as opposed to US).

And saying the infrastructure is just bandwidth is like saying you just a keyboard to code. Random example, I assume many big name games face similar challenges. [0] I think we can agree maintaining a setup that allows players all over the world to play in good conditions while preventing cheating, and many, many other services costs and involve quite a bit more than just the net link.

[0] https://www.networkworld.com/article/2895129/big-data-and-ba...

Yes, there are lots of other costs for running a network service besides bandwidth. But those are heavily if not completely independent of the number of users. Your anti-cheating effort costs about the same regardless of whether you have a million users or ten million users.

So you can sell the game at a loss meaning once your sales have dried up you haven been able to make a profit or even cover your costs. And you can "sell at a loss in one country" meaning you're willing to let that one country not cover its share of the predicted income (meaning if you sold everywhere like that you'd go bankrupt fast) just because you can get more market share. And some other region will compensate.

I'm sorry you would rather nitpick on the wording instead of the point being made, which I'm sure I explained pretty clearly. And this already exists in practice so obviously the logic behind it is sound.

> But those are heavily if not completely independent of the number of users.

So what if the number of users/sessions hosted increased by 3 orders of magnitude, right? The databases, the game servers, the login servers, the web servers, security, management, and everything else that also has to be geo-located will just balloon to accommodate the extra users or markets at no cost as all IT infrastructure tends to do.

Again, here are some random numbers from almost a decade ago for a game that's probably far less demanding than anything today [0]. Having x US servers vs. having 3x US servers and 5x Asia servers is not quite "independent" of user numbers and location.

[0] http://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/gdceurope2011/slides/Ma...