Exactly. It’s kind of weird how people are thinking of physical merchandise rules and concepts when debating sales and discounts for digital goods.
It’s like assuming that Steam can only sell a set amount of copies for any given game. Like, that doesn’t make any sense. It’s a digital good, so they can generate an unlimited amount of copies for whatever it is.
For digital goods, you don’t even need to sell it for even 1/10th the cost of production, since you’re assuming more than 10 people will be buying it and it cost nothing to create a digital good after it’s been made originally.
Path of Exile could realistically sell cosmetics for like $1 each and so long as like 1,000 people buy it, they’ve covered the cost of production and man-hours.
While that may be an extreme and an unrealistic price, it gets the point across.
The cost of covering servers and content development is usually covered (for a period of time) by the initial buy in price. It’s not perfect, and some months may see less profit than others, but it’s not as clear cut as “without cosmetic MTX the servers will die.”
I’ll buy cosmetics if they’re well priced and look cool, so I’m not arguing against a MTX shop in the slightest.