[hiou]

It does when you live in a dorm or your parent's house. Same as a pizza delivery driver using their parent's car. Or Uber drivers unable to do the math on their costs.

There a lots and lots of markets where the seller almost always loses. Look at art and music.

[yarou]

You didn't answer the parent's comment, though. The answer is that the cost of electricity is greater than running this game, even if it's run in the background.

It's irrelevant if you live in a dorm or your parent's house - you just pass on the cost to whomever is the responsible party. And you finish with a rather bizarre statement about markets where the seller loses. There are markets where a large number of sellers compete for a shrinking amount of market share with an undifferentiated product. But it's irrational for someone to sell something at a loss in the medium to long term, overall (unless they are a monopolist).

[Robadob]

>The answer is that the cost of electricity is greater than running this game, even if it's run in the background.

There's a 3rd party application that most serious card idlers use, it uses negligible processing power, just pings the SteamWorks API to say you're playing the game. So if you have steam open in the background, I doubt this adds more visible cost than having a pinned tab in chrome.

http://www.steamidlemaster.com/

[TheCoelacanth]

Externalizing as many of your costs as you can is business 101.

[hiou]

The seller doesn't realize they are losing because they are not correctly calculating their costs. With art and music and things like pizza delivery / Uber churn maintains the market as the unaccounted for costs(debt, depreciation etc) finally catch up to the current participants removing them.