Reducing the supply of something generally increases the profitability. Like that’s day one in Econ 101 info there.
If there’s 1000 people that each want one unit of product, in this case gold, then each of those people have their own price they’d be willing to pay for it, for some it might be $1 per gold, for some it might be $20 per gold. In a perfectly competitive economy, that gold ends up being as close to the cost as possible because if the price is higher than the cost more suppliers enter the market, if the price is lower than the cost suppliers exit the economy until it reaches equilibrium. (I should note I don’t consider the gold seller economy to be a perfectly competitive one- but if it were that’s how it’d function)
If there’s only 100 units of gold though, a scarcity of supply well below the profitable demand, suppliers can price it as high as the top 100 buyers will buy at and still sell it all, that might be something like $10.
If cost were say, $1, and at equilibrium price is $1 there’s no profit. If cost remains the same across the market, but price goes up to $10 and supply is only 100 units, the profit is $900.
That’s actually completely wrong, in fact accounts are a pretty good example of being one of the closest things on the planet to being limitless, and while there’s a technical limit that’d be based on technological limitations- the ‘limit’ would effectively be how many characters can be on a realm at a time. Not only is that an extremely improbable limit for any botter to hit, but if you hit it you’d actually get rid of anyone’s ability to buy gold as they could not play the game itself due to bots taking every single slot.
Even then, technically it’s not wow accounts that are the limited resource, but server capacity.
Do you have even the slightest understanding of economics? Because the irony here is that you really don’t seem to be at even a grade school level.
If I want an actual limited resource, such as say gold, no cost in the world can make a mine I own that has 100 pounds of gold have more than 100 pounds of gold. But I can absolutely make a thousand, a million, a billion accounts for WoW if I incur the cost.
Why? Because real life gold is an actual limited resource, and wow accounts and WoW gold are not a limited resource.
They have ways around this, the most obvious of which is to just use a retail account to buy tokens with gold they’ve botted there. They may have numerous other methods, but even if we solely thinking in terms of legitimate ways that we could do ourselves, it can be done without a sub cost to them. Stealing accounts is not as common as you think, it’s not a part of their business plan, and it’s not necessary- getting to level 60 is not a challenge for them, because they don’t have to do anything- they’re bots, they literally get to 60 on their own, that’s what they do.
BUT, let’s just say for a moment that bots indeed were using a VPN to a place with a lower sub, so they did have to pay the $3 per month sub fee from pretending they’re in Argentina. That means to be profitable, a bot needs to recoup initial costs (botting software, their set up, etc…), but after that their cost per month is that $3 plus overhead costs like internet/electricity/computer maintenance split between however many bots they have running. I’m sure you don’t know how much a bot can make in a month, but it’s a lot more than $3.