Comment Re: Wow (Score 2) 463
The fundamentals of the broken window fallacy means that if you break the bakers window you create a demand for another window and 'stimulate' the economy. The Fallacy aspect is the fact that the baker has now spent that money on a new window instead of a new pot that he needed as well, leading to a sum of a broken window, a new whole window but no new pot. The loss is the opportunity cost of something else not getting bought and produced.
The same applies to wine bottles (if they're drinking (or breaking) them to create demand rather than to enjoy them).
The same could theoretically be applied to virtual goods destruction, but the opportunity cost for virtual goods is actually in the creation side for them. As they are artificially scarce they could theoretically be instantiated en-masse without any cost at all, freeing up money for the production of actual scarce resources being created within the economy.
However, at least for games like EVE, a significant portion of the entertainment is derived from the production of artificially scarce virtual goods. People pay to sit around producing them, unlike windows where very few pay to hang around in a window factory making windows. This means that the failure to just instantiate a titan for anyone who wants one does not carry the same cost to the real world economy as would a failure to instantly replicate a window, could it be done at the same zero cost.