![](https://media.kbin.social/media/25/c6/25c604af080d7590fd03afe117eca61de2172a8f3cd9ea04efd08ad2da46d806.jpg)
![](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8286e071-7449-4413-a084-1eb5242e2cf4.png)
Probably bandwidth. You download a game or five and then you’re good for a few weeks, whereas if you are streaming media you could run through several gigabytes a day of data per customer in perpetuity.
Obviously, with streaming media there is a continuously refreshing pool of money to cover those costs as compared to games being a one-time purchase, but even with that it would still take quite a while to expend the entire revenue of the purchased game in download expenses and storage overhead.
It’s called shucking and it happens a lot especially in the home server home lab community.