Without rehashing everything that's been said about vanities vs necessities (i.e. maps and such), look at it this way. Here's Holo-ween and it'll cost you 10 plat to join in. Since it's the plat purchase that you make that counts (it isn't as if STS gets money *again* when you use your plat, just when you buy it the first time), let's say that people dash out and buy plat at the smallest increment--30 plat for $5.00. Ignoring the fact that STS doesn't see $5.00 worth of profit (Google/PayPal/whateverthethirdoneis takes a cut for the transaction), if 10,000 people rushed to do this, STS would stand to make $50,000. That's the credit side. Now the debit side: take out for taxes, building rent and/or maintenance, salaries, hardware replacement/addition/upgrades, software replacement/addition/upgrades, employee health care plans (one would hope), utilities, and the list goes on for quite a long way from there. There are larger companies that'll spend $50,000 in the course of a year for paper-towels and TP for the company bathrooms. $50K is not much to a technology-driven company. Honestly, it's not. According to the all-knowing Innerwebs, the average, median salary for a game designer is 73K. Giving the guys at STS a biggish pay-cut to 60K and saying there's, oh say, 5 of them, salaries alone would account for 300,000 a year. That 50K looks kind of small in comparison. And that magic big-num is assuming that there's even 10k people playing it right now and that they all bought plat.

If STS is like most tech companies, they'll see a small, relatively steady trickle of income 75-85% of the time and a boost to that income when something releases. Those "injections of revenue" (Gah! I hate suit-speak!) have to pay for the costs that continue to accrue even when you're not releasing anything and only getting the small trickle. Salaries don't magically get suspended when income isn't being generated (well, they do, but those are called lay-offs. :/ ). Rent, maintenance and utilities still have to be paid. The federal government does tend to want their cut when they want it, as do city/county and state governments--they all have their hand in the till, too.

As sad as I am that people have to pay plat for things like Holo-ween (or Halloween in PL), I do try to remember that STS is a company with bills to pay and a payroll to meet. The line gets blurred a little for us all, I think, because there's much more of a "human face" to STS. The Devs are communicative, so we see them as people and not just a bunch of company drones.