No, you’ve entirely missed the point. There is a large, up front research cost to drugs (and video games). If you have no whales, you might not expect the game

No, you’ve entirely missed the point. There is a large, up front research cost to drugs (and video games). If you have no whales, you might not expect the game to ever achieve enough gross revenue (revenue minus variable costs, sort of) to offset the research costs. Given you already have the drug, sure, it makes sense to keep selling it. But if you try to research more drugs and make more games with no whales, you will quickly go out of business. The video game analogy is apt. These kinds of video games are only possible because of whales. If whales could not exist due to regulations similar to drugs, they would not be developed / researched