I think you confused yourself there hunni, you just made my argument for me.
The difference between what you earn and what you spend is profit, your words.
So if I spend nothing and I earn nothing there is no profit.
The rest of it you pulled out of your arse, that has nothing to do with the definition. I was already net positive 5 dollars to start with. Still having that 5 dollars is not making a profit, it's breaking even.
So glad you decided to drag this up 8 months later just to repeat what I already said. Also glad you started with "so let's try explaining this" so you could be wrong while also sounding pretentious.
I imagine you wore a fedora while typing that.
Not to sound like an ass in a months long discussion I wasn't invited to in a thread clearly not made for this chebang but since the game is likely to stay on hold for quite some time and all that I gotta say he's kinda right you know.
Economically speaking, profit is the resultant of "total revenue - total expenses" so whatever X you earn by your job, investments, freelas, etc.. minus the whole lot of Y you waste in order to survive, with entertainment, to eat ungodly amounts of chocolate, etc.. ends up defining your Z profit for any given period, so if you really liked this game and you'd have paid for it in order to play it but ended up not doing so because its free anyway then your profit for that period inevitably rises. Whether or not you also happen to sell the thing you didn't pay for in the first place is just a matter of squeezing even more profit to the resultant, even if you still end up having negative profit because of all those Lindt bars.
Now going for a personal philosophical opinion to me it just sounds like mental gymnastics so we can better cope with getting away not paying for something someone else put effort and man-hours in creating. I'm not saying this is specifically your case so don't take it the wrong way but If we're pirates and we steal for the sake of enjoyment then it feels less hypocritical to just state so. We're dicks doing dick things and that's just that.